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Posted on August 4, 2025 | 19 Comments
I was invited to give a couple of talks at the Speaker’s Forum in the Glastonbury Festival in June, which I’ve just reprised at the Green Gathering this weekend. In this post, I’m going to tell some stories loosely about my trip to Glastonbury, focusing less on the talks and more on the trip.
There’s a chapter in my forthcoming book in which a narrator living in a crisis-ridden fictional future walks from London to Glastonbury, so when it came to speaking at the festival I felt I had no option but to stick with that storyline and walk there. Okay, so the Glastonbury Festival isn’t quite in Glastonbury, and my home is a lot closer to it than London, but let us not be distracted by such trifles. The walk was about fifteen miles, with another couple added for getting lost halfway along the route and then getting lost in the festival site itself. That felt plenty enough for the day.
So then, I left home early on an overcast Thursday morning and was on unfamiliar terrain within the hour. The small circle of my days amazes me sometimes.
The first part of the walk saw me traversing thick woodland on the eastern edge of the Mendips, edging around the gigantic Whatley quarry. Some of this woodland area itself was a working quarry until the mid-twentieth century, but on that morning all was quiet in the woods. A buzzard perched on an oak branch with its back to me, oblivious to my presence until I was within a few yards. It’s amazing how quickly nature can bounce back. Although sadly permission has recently been granted to open some of this ground for quarrying again.
The most striking thing about the walk was that until I got to Shepton Mallet, the small town nearest to the festival site, I barely encountered another soul. A woman walking a dog crossed my path a hundred yards ahead. Later, two walkers likewise crossed in front. That was it. The handful of villages I walked through were deserted. The only people I otherwise saw were motorists on the country lanes I occasionally crossed. If it hadn’t been for their relaxed demeanour as they swooshed past it could easily have felt as if I’d stumbled into a zombie apocalypse.
The underpopulation of the countryside tallied with the underuse of its fields. Occasionally there was a field of wheat, rape or the dreaded maize silage, but mostly it was temporary or permanent grass, sometimes with a smattering of dairy cows, the only livestock I saw – in about equal numbers to the people driving by. There’s something to be said for dairying in this area, and I’m not against it, but you could carve a lot of vegetable allotments out of these fields. The cows did save the day for me at one point, though. Lost along a fast, straight road that the map told me ought to be the footpath, I heard a mooing from below. Battling through the undergrowth, I looked down on herd of cows walking single file along an underpass where my own route lay. Peak Somerset.
As I was crossing a broad field of clover – let’s hear it for organics! – the heavens opened, and I ran to get beneath a solo oak. A man alone, sprinting for a sheltering tree through a wet, virid field, I saw myself framed as an actor in one of those French arthouse films full of beautiful images of the countryside which builds portentously to some tragic end.
There nearly was a tragic end. After Shepton Mallet, I had to walk the last few miles along fast country roads without pavements, flattening myself against hedges at the sound of cars speeding around the sharp corners. There were a few close shaves and I was fearful that the last mile along the main trunk road would be the end of me. Happily, there was a huge jam of festival traffic along it. I walked a large part of the final mile down the middle of the road, past stationary buses, old vans and cars piled high with festivalgoers and camping gear.
Arrival was pretty overwhelming for this reclusive country boy. The festival organisers call it a ‘pop-up city’, which seems about right. With 200,000 people, it’s more than twice as big as Somerset’s biggest permanent urban area, and would count as about the thirtieth biggest city in the country, or 0.2 percent of the entire population. Having walked for most of the day in near solitude, I found it hard to handle.
Over the next three days, I went through my own microcosmic version of the city migration experience. This is hell, I want to go home. Okay, now I’m getting to know my way around – hey, there’s some cool stuff happening here. Yeah, but ultimately what does it all mean?
My thoughts wandered to another gathering place some miles to the east. There are endless theories about the purpose of Stonehenge, but one that finds some favour with contemporary archaeologists is that in a sparsely populated country of agrarian pioneers it was another pop-up city – a place of pilgrimage to affirm connection with far-flung compatriots, renew a sense of purpose and reconcile with the gods.
And Glastonbury? Well, I saw a lot of interesting stuff there, and heard some good music – a rollcall of worldwide greats of the past and present (one advantage of being a parent is that you get to know about bands whose members weren’t even born when you hung up your dancing shoes). But I didn’t really get that sense of connection, purpose and reconciliation. I daresay some of the festivalgoers did. There was great music, transporting us to another place. But not, for me, the place. A problem for the agrarian localist is how to reconcile with an unreconcilable modernity.
One of the singers I went to see was Burning Spear. Not a newbie, but an oldie – a reunion for me after the passage of about forty years. As a teenager growing up in the commuter belt just outside London, I nurtured a vague sense that there was something weird and alienated about our way of life there that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I’d heard a bit of Bob Marley, bopped along to songs like ‘Jamming’, decided I liked reggae and so one day on an impulse bought Spear’s album Hail H.I.M. When I lowered the needle, I got a high-voltage electric jolt I remember to this day. A spiritual one, I mean – my old silver Sony music centre was working fine, and the sound that came out of it was clear as a bell.
Hail Jah Tafari
Hail Jah Tafari
Hail Him for everything which is good
Words of a life and belief so different from my own, sung in a strange, rich voice that seemed to carry the soulforce of the very Earth, Spear shattered my suburban firmament and rocked me to my core.
At Glastonbury, he sang another song from that album, African Postman.
Sons and daughters of His Imperial Majesty
Haile Selassie, Earth rightful ruler, without any apology say
This is the time when I and I and I should come home
And so it was that I found an authenticity missing from my life in the words of a Jamaican singing about an authenticity missing from his due to the colonialism and enslavement inflicted historically on his people by my country.
Some years ago, I read an article I now can’t find by the inestimable Gary Younge, formerly of The Guardian – one of my fellow speakers in the Green Field this year, who gave a fascinating Q&A (including the intimation that all wasn’t quite well at his former employer … who knew?) As I recall, Younge’s argument was something along the lines that white boys and girls too often discover black history and culture for themselves in a kind of ardent, wide-eyed way that ultimately speaks more to their own self-centred journeyings than to anything that gives its due to black people’s lives and struggles today. Well, he nailed my younger self there.
It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that that needle falling on Spear’s Hail H.I.M album propelled me into a career in social science, a brief and ill-fated research trip to Jamaica, and ultimately into a life as a politically-motivated petty landowner selling pricey vegetables to rich folk in southern England fully a hundred miles from where I grew up. I’m sure it’d give him a warm feeling if he knew how far I’d come, thanks to him. (By the way, if you make fun of me in this way on social media – as some do – it’ll earn you instant muting, because it’s not a fair summation of my work and it’s no way to start a courteous conversation. I, however, am allowed…)
Bottom line in all this is that there are some tricky questions around cultural purpose, reconciliation and finding our way home that, for all the great music I heard at Glastonbury, I didn’t find great answers to there. I think this is because contemporary modern culture hasn’t found great answers to them. A not great way of trying to find them for a white, middle-class, British guy like me is by vicariously imputing the answers to oppressed people and their struggles – something that Musa al-Gharbi mercilessly anatomizes in his book We Have Never Been Woke. I aim to come back to this shortly in another post.
The singer I listened to at Glastonbury who seemed to me most authentically and happily grounded in place was Louis Dunford, his place being working-class, multiethnic north London. The problem there is that I’m not sure how much future that particular place has in view of the meta-crisis now upon us. Still, I hope Dunford’s stories of people with hard lives getting by and somehow getting along might outlast the locational specifics.
Talking of locational specifics, one theme in my writing – and in one of my talks at Glastonbury – is the unravelling of modern polities and nation-states in the context of that meta-crisis, and the emergence of more autonomist local politics, for better or worse. It was interesting in that respect that Frome denizen and Guardian journalist John Harris wrote a piece about the progressive leftish politics on display at Glastonbury, which he thinks gives the lie to the sense that Britain is a “stroppy little island” full of mistrust and rancour that’s well on its way toward a far-right Faragist government. Instead, he says, there’s a silent majority who feel alienated from this rightward political drift – “I see this new England every year at Worthy Farm in Somerset” (Worthy Farm meaning the Glastonbury Festival).
It’s a thought-provoking article. One question I have about it is the extent to which we need or will continue to have the political container of ‘England’ within which to frame politics. We tend to talk about existing countries and nation-states as if they’re timeless, rather than often quite recent and contingent concoctions that could easily fragment in the future. Suppose Glastonbury or Bristol were autonomous or quasi-autonomous entities with a different kind of politics to that which emanates from London or Westminster? But now I’m starting to give away the story told by the itinerant narrator in my book, so I’ll leave that hanging for now.
If existing state politics does fragment, how towns, cities and their hinterlands create the material basis for life – clean water, food, clothes and shelter – in the challenged future becomes important. One aspect of living in a pop-up city is that its ways of managing brute material life are more visible. Big John Deeres toting tanks of human effluent, long stretches of the blue MDPE pipe familiar from my own farming career delivering life-giving water to the numerous standpipes (I couldn’t help harbouring a fear of what might happen during those brutally hot three days if there was a disruption to the water supply), and trucks delivering vast quantities of packaged food in early morning hours when most people were still asleep.
Permanent cities manage all this a bit more efficiently, perhaps. Certainly, they manage it more invisibly. But can they manage it sustainably in the long-term, in energetic and other ways? I heard various claims at the festival about the extent to which some or all of it was renewably powered. My hunch is that the tractors, the tanks, the trucks, the traffic jams and the water pipes have a different story to tell.
It was a comfort therefore to spend a bit of time in the craft field, where traditional blacksmiths, woodturners, basket-makers and other such fashioners of the extended human phenotype plied their trade. They were charging a tidy sum for people to try their hand at making simple items like spoons – the kind of thing we scarcely give a thought to in the material cornucopia of modern life, but do need time and skill to make. I felt a warmth for these craftspeople. For sure, they were selling pricey products to rich folk in southern England etc etc. But to me they’re a sleeping tribe, biding their time as best they can until the pop-up cities of modernity pop off, and their skills are called for a higher purpose.
There’s a small p politics in this craftwork that, in my opinion, doesn’t get nearly enough airing. I try my best to air it in my writing, but it’s hard to get a hearing in the face of the big P politics that dominates mainstream discussion. And Glastonbury was a place of big P politics. P is for Protest. P is for Palestine. P is for what the Prime Minister said the throngs of us at the festival should or shouldn’t be listening to there. I’ll leave all that for now, and touch lightly on it in my next post. Instead, I’ll give the last word – almost – to another one of the oldies performing at the festival. John Fogerty, accompanied by his sons, seemed heart-warmingly delighted to have regained the rights to sing his own songs after a long copyright dispute, belting out the swamp rock in his 81st year with gusto. I think we’d do well to heed these words of his a bit more in our big P politics:
I hear hurricanes a-blowing
I know the end is coming soon
I fear rivers overflowing
I hear the voice of rage and ruin
But I’m going to give the last word of all to a chiffchaff perched in a tree near my tent. I never saw it, but when I woke in the early mornings to the drum and bass of the all-night sound systems, I heard it indomitably trying to match its voice against their power-assisted ones in the gaps between the notes. Is there a solace in nature to be found there, that eventually these times will pass? Douff-douff-douff chiff-chaff.
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I think of that 1981 movie, An American Werewolf in London, every time I hear John Fogerty’s song Bad Moon Rising. Especially since the movie theater I first saw it in had a bitchin’ sound system. That was 1980s multimedia. But then, the chiffchaff outside your tent is good too, the 2020s natural multimedia vying with the all-night sound systems.
I was at the annual bio-faire in Couiza, l’Aude yesterday. I got a Boycott Israel sticker along with my France Solidarité Palestine button. But they didn’t have any Boycott Amerika stickers. Too bad. Maybe they had some and they were such a hot item they were all gone.
Somethings don’t change , when I went to the first festival Russia was the evil empire B52 bombers were at Upper Heyford and Vulcan’ scattered across the country , today its cruise missiles and Russia is still the evil empire , I don’t think they are testing air raid sirens anymore if there are any left . we did have some sane politicians then , today I am not so sure .
Thanks Chris.
Well, I guess England is a little different than the US.
If I were to walk 15 miles to the next town in the county, it would need to be largely on roads built for cars. That isn’t true for exactly all of the US, but here in Kansas, all of the old trails have been erased or fenced or turned into major highways. The exception here is a small number of abandoned railways that have been returned to walk/bike paths.
Seventy years ago I could have gotten on a train just 3 blocks from my house and taken it to that very town I was trying to walk to. But now the abandoned/restored path goes by my house and ends a couple of miles down the way at restored wetlands, private fields, a stretch of woods, and more fenced fields. It’s better here than many places then, but still not passable without at least half the miles on busy roadways. Fortunately, they have been building shoulders on them lately here.
Funny, I found my musical tribe with a bunch of white boys from Ohio when I put on that first Devo record in 1978. But still, when I heard Bad Brains in 1979, my jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe you could do that on the radio. Not so much an awakening as a reason to run around in small circles with a crowd of friends.
I find old Gary Yonge most estimable, I’ve listened to a few of his pod casts and find him comfortable with the enclosures that keep him in the pink, or to put it another way, class cuts across race. I was a ‘white’ boy smoking weed at 13 with the other lads from the council estates of Crawley New Town and listening to Ragga, Reggea’s criminal nephew, before finding the roots. Reggae is international recognised as the music of the oppressed, the diaspora and the youth of the world, and is renewed as such each generation. Even a tribe native Americans of Turtle Island, on land in the bottom of the Grand Canyon have taken on Haile Selassie as the ‘supreme affidavit’ through the message of Reggea.
The invention of blackness is constructed after the united uprising of African and Irish slaves; the inestimable Burning Spear sings:
Do you remember the days of slavery?
History can recall the days of slavery!
And history can recall the days of slavery of all peoples below the class of aristocrat, the murder and rape and extinguishing of all peoples for enclosure and primitive accumulation, ecocide and genocide. We live in its ruins. So I find the likes of Gary a kind of George, speaking on both sides of their mouths, a partiality which is more than an indulgence, more like a complicity – in dividing the lived experience of young (and now old people) with the smug language of academia/journalism. The truth of reggea’s embodied message, dance and song and rhythm and story is well beyond the Ken of such folk, the kids know this.
You felt what you felt and still feeling it! That is as real as it gets.
Its a shame we were not up in the craft fields this year. A fantastic piece of writing, thank you, looking forward to the book.
This was lovely to read, Chris, and makes me look forward to your next book very much; is there a preferred place to pre-order it from in the UK?
The line between solidarity and vicariousness or appropriation of other people’s struggles is a tricky one at times, at least for this white lady with two university music degrees. But turning away isn’t necessarily any better.
As far as cities are concerned… every area of London I’ve lived in (and there are a few!) was significantly less populated in 1801 (or as far back as I can find information by a desultory web search) than it is today, and most of these areas went from mostly market gardens (for feeding, er, London, then a metropolis of one million people) to industry and then denser population. The interesting bit (to me at any rate) is that what is now Tower Hamlets actually had a lower population in 2021 than in 1901, when it started falling… and kept falling, and falling, until growth resumed in time for the 1991 census. (Many other areas showed some decline in population for a few decades post-WW2, which I’m going to assume was related to all the new council housing being built to replace what had been slums, and the associated establishment of various New Towns. Perhaps Ebenezer Howard’s vision of the Garden Cities is worth revisiting and adapting as part of a small farm future…) It still hasn’t caught up to the 1891 high, though, and I wonder whether that’s partly the railways. A real concern in a crumbling London could be drinking water and sewage handling, the latter of which is extremely reliant on powered pumping stations. This is not an insurmountable problem, by any means, but like anything where we currently throw too-cheap energy at a predicament, it is potentially an expensive one.
Thanks for those comments. Not much to add. I’ve not read a lot of Gary Younge’s stuff lately – generally I’ve found him quite nuanced, but maybe you’re right Joel … I won’t get further into the intersections of race, class & youth right now, but it’s likely to come up in some future posts.
Regarding pre-ordering the book, there aren’t any special provisions in the UK (Barnes & Noble is probably the go to in the US) so I’d suggest just ordering from your independent local bookshop.
There will be a local launch on 14 October at the Town Hall here in Frome, and another event at the Oxford Real Farming Conference early in January. I’ll keep folks here informed about any other events as they emerge 🙂
That was quite the walk. Like Eric mentions, public footpaths are tragically underappreciated here. I had to map your walk as it brought back fond memories of my own trip from Frome to Mells via Vallis Veg. I missed a turn in the path and also ended up on a fast country road that then led me way to close to the quarry for comfort.
The mapping exercise revealed some impressive water works west and northwest of Glastonbury. Are they or were they agricultural in nature?
“For sure, they were selling pricey products to rich folk in southern England etc etc. But to me they’re a sleeping tribe, biding their time as best they can until the pop-up cities of modernity pop off, and their skills are called for a higher purpose.”
This statement resonates as I think about the futility of small farms (both in economics and generally “making a difference”), the need to cater to the wealthy, and the awesome human connection of talking with other like minded people. Reconciling the craftworks with the tractors, the tanks, the trucks, and the traffic jams that make a livelihood remotely possible is also interesting. I feel the same inner conflict using giant diesel machines to make water saving infrastructure investments. The machines can provoke feelings of guilt while doing mindblowing amounts of work. There is also their tendency to make an operator feel sheer childish glee. I’ve settled on a policy of renting while they’re still an option, carefully choosing projects, and allowing myself to enjoy the ride.
Thanks for another good one, Chris.
Thanks Rob. The land north & west of Glastonbury is the Somerset Levels, an area of low-lying peat wetlands. Historically, a lot of it was grazed in the summer with the livestock taken up into the Mendips in the winter (hence Somerset = summer land). Historically also a lot of the peat was cut for fuel, and there’s been a lot of drainage and water management in the area. Many of the peat cuttings are now inundated and left as wildlife refuges, which might be what you’re seeing on the map, for example around Shapwick.
Thanks for the response! Exactly, between Glastonbury and Shapwick. From Google Maps, it looks like a chinampa style agricultural experiment, but sounds like it could just be a peat mining relic.
This might be a very important “heads up” for people doing their own landrace development. It certainly is for me. In a nutshell, transposable elements (TEs), or transposons, or “jumping genes” have been very important for the evolution of domestic crops. The classic example is maize (corn for Americans) and Barbara McClintock discovered TEs in maize in the 1940s when she was at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Transposons do not only change position, or “jump,” on the chromosome arms but in the DNA codons too. You can see the phenotypic expression on the maize seed as stripes, usually red or blue. I am doing experiments on this right now.
A new discovery has been made that transposons are more prevalent than earlier thought AND that they have an epigenetic influence on human development. This discovery also points to the importance of retroviruses in human evolution, as well as other eukaryotes. In other words, the 45% of the human genome that was thought of as “junk DNA” is not junk after all. This is HUGE. Here are a couple of web links.
https://ground.news/article/ancient-viral-dna-may-play-a-key-role-in-early-human-development-new-study-suggests?emailIdentifier=dailyGround&edition=Aug-10-2025&token=a788a625-a573-4f05-bf16-6e6a8feef78e&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-newsletter&category=top&subCategory=Europe
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7829209/
Thanks for this — I’m a bit short of time, but for those of us doing landrace crop development on a micro scale in extremely open-pollinated environments (i.e. I can’t effectively enforce any kind of isolation distances) with no access to genetic analysis, what are the practical implications?
Think in terms of time instead of space. Some late-planted squashes, for example. Late planting also encourages the seasonal annuals to “hurry up.”
In-breeders like beans will still be controllable.
Plant a lot under all kinds of conditions and see what survives.
Look up line breeding. I mix earlier years with current seed.
Mongrels are your friends.
Good luck.
I’m laughing to myself about this because one of my current breeding projects is growing out the F2 generation of an accidental F1 bean (I believe a cross between Cosse Violette and Cherokee Trail of Tears, based on what I was growing the year I saved that seed and the variations I’m seeing in the F2 plants). I haven’t decided whether to just keep it as a landrace or try and isolate and stabilise the three or four phenotypes I’ve observed so far.
Meanwhile my attempts to cross two Cucurbita maxima by hand pollination have failed (no fruit),and my F2 blight resistant tomatoes this year look so much like the variety I saved seed from last year, with so little variation, that I’m not sure it (a commercial variety) is actually an F1 as it claims.
I am coming to the conclusion that plants mostly do what they want, and we can select a little. I don’t necessarily want control as much as I want resilience and I think diversity is a big part of resilience. I’ll probably continue purchase seed for things like sweet peppers, where crossing with their hot counterparts happens easily (my spouse doesn’t have much capsaicin tolerance), and I haven’t messed around much with biennials.
But I’m not sure how your advice is relevant to the stuff about the transposons, which is what I was trying to ask about. Transposons exist, okay, great, and they’re kindof a big deal. What,if anything, might I change in my approach to breeding as a result?
Hand pollinating any squash will give you a greater appreciation of bees. We got about 1 in 5 to take.
If you have a bean that you like already, keep planting it. Otherwise, plant them all together again and select from the next generation.
Selecting for disease resistance in tomatoes can produce results in a couple years. It helps if you have room to set out a couple hundred so you can have a wider base to choose from.
Transposons ? How do you tell it from any other random mutation ? I don’t think they are a factor on our scale. People have been saving seeds for 10,000 years. Transposons were ‘discovered’ in the 1940s…
Greg
Yes, bees are fantastic and I mostly let my squash do what they want now. I tend not to save seed from C. pepo so much, since there are people growing both summer and winter squash types as well as the odd ornamental gourd, but squash seed keeps pretty well for a few years so in the event of some kind of supply chain disruption that forces me to switch, I’d manage all right.
I have so many beans I already like! But I am excited about the one plant that was the F1, which had deep purple pods like Cosse Violette and black seeds like Cherokee Trail of Tears. So if I select out I’ll probably go for that combination. All of the F2 generation are tasty enough when young; it looks like they all produce black seeds on ripening, which will mean it’s substantially easier to grow them all out together — if the beans themselves were different colours then I could harvest at the same time and then sort later but this way that would mean labelling individual plants and keeping the seed separate, which frankly smacks of effort.
I’ll see how I go with the tomatoes. An awful lot of the commercially available blight resistant varieties taste like cardboard but a few don’t, so I’m starting with those and then only saving the seeds from F2 plants that actually taste good, and repeating in further generations.
I just wote a whole book on how to change your paradigms so that you can figure it out for yourself. I gave you several paradigm hints. As I say so often, no one knows your situation as well as you do. Of course, “plants mostly do what they want, and we can select a little.” As far as “control” goes, it is not a bright line.
Greg – Transposons are not “just” something that were “discovered in the 1940s.” They are a huge, huge part of evolution by natural selection. The whole field of epigenetics is more important than people realize. There may have even been astute farmers in Oaxaca thousands of years ago that noticed the phenotypic characteristics and even made the connection between genotype and phenotype, long before Mendel. I certainly don’t know. My mission statement is, “We need plant and animal varieties that can adapt to climate change.” People need to do their own experiments and this often requires a paradigm shift. I have provided plentiful examples of how to make paradigm shifts over the years, both in my books and on social media. In this instance, I gave out the links so that interested parties could read the information for themselves.
@Walter,
That is true. But, for all the seeds you have saved, how many new varieties are from outcrossing versus random mutation ?
There were astute farmers in Oaxaca and Mesopotamia thousands of years ago otherwise we would have the food crops we have today. My point is that the ideal mutation may take thousands of years to appear. Most of us don’t have that kind of time.
More interesting to me is disease resistance. Last year we had an epidemic of aster yellows. Even after carefully sorting seed garlic, about half of it did not emerge or died early.
Garlic is a clone but people still select the largest bulbs for planting. Planting cloves from medium and large bulbs results in large bulbs. Planting healthy cloves from small bulbs generally does not produce large bulbs.
Beyond that, there are a couple papers that indicate that there are differences between the cloves in a single garlic bulb. Is there enough genetic variation in garlic to allow selection for aster yellows resistance ? A similar situation would apply to potatoes.
Greg – Salient points. But let’s step back a little bit. In effect, let’s move from the micro to the macro; from the genotype to the phenotype. I don’t really care if the root cause of a new variety is from outcrossing or random mutation or recombination on the chromosome or epigenetic switching of genes on or off.
1) I am looking for plant landraces that are more “flexible” in their genome; more resilient, more viable, etc. Resilience is the current buzzword. Can we say that the variation we see as plant breeders will be a consistent pattern in the future? No we cannot. We don’t know if the variant we see this season will be transmitted in the succeeding seed lines. So let’s take a lesson from the game of poker – specifically Hold ’em. The trope, or “meme” if you wish, is, “Pocket aces don’t always win the pot – but that’s the way to bet!” The “way to bet” in landrace development is to collect the seeds from the “winners” and plant them out.
2) “Plant them out” is probably the most important paradigm in landrace development. At the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, there are thousands of seed lines catalogued and stored. BUT will the seeds that are stored there be able to handle the new climatic conditions if they are planted out in the future? I see it as <50%, i.e. not likely. Here is a link to an interesting article on the flaws of this approach. (BTW, I started my program in 1997, long before the Svalbard facility opened in 2008.)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-arctic-seed-vault-shows-the-flawed-logic-of-climate-adaptation/#:~:text=Because%20of%20this%20biological%20lag,not%20typically%20propagated%20through%20seeds.
3) There is no "ideal mutation." That kind of thinking is what led R.A. Fisher down the rabbit hole of eugenics. There are mutations that are replicated and increase in heritability over time in the population, but no "ideal" mutation. To be very, very blunt about the role of randomness, "Shit happens and sometimes it sticks." Here are a couple of blurbs from the Wikipedia entry on Ronald Fisher (not the New Zealand cricketer, BTW). Fisher's greatest insights came from his work on agriculture at Rothamstead Agricultural Station. Everything else flowed from his numeracy about what was happening on the land and in the soil. I do the same thing, but on a much smaller scale.
[Begin quote]
For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science" and "the single most important figure in 20th century statistics". In genetics, Fisher was the one to most comprehensively combine the ideas of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin, as his work used mathematics to combine Mendelian genetics and natural selection; this contributed to the revival of Darwinism in the early 20th-century revision of the theory of evolution known as the modern synthesis.
From 1919, he worked at the Rothamsted Experimental Station for 14 years; there, he analyzed its immense body of data from crop experiments since the 1840s, and developed the analysis of variance (ANOVA). He established his reputation there in the following years as a biostatistician. Fisher also made fundamental contributions to multivariate statistics.
[End quote]
4) Part of landrace development is working with clones and other means of propagation. For example, I have some young plum trees that came up from the stones of plums that dropped on the ground. These are going to be different from the parent trees, which were a variety grafted onto a hardy rootstock. But will they do well in a changing climate? Maybe yes, maybe no. We shall see. They are thornier than grafted plum stock purchased from a nursery, so that raises an epigenetic question as well as an adaptation question in a harsher environment of heat waves in summer. I also don't water them at all, so that has some effect as compared to other crops.
5) Another example is to prioritize other qualities besides yield. Consider Osiris potatoes. I got them in 2019 here in France, but they soon disappeared in favor of other varieties. I keep the seed line going, even though they have low yield, because I like the taste. My first landrace experiments in 1997 were with Buttercup squash, which has been my favorite winter squash since I was a boy back on the farm in Minnesota, USA.
6) The time factor. Yes, there are experiments that we do, even though we will likely not see the results. In the grand scheme of things, I will probably die in my bed with the lights and the heat on. My partner’s children and grandchildren may not. The same for my current work. My partner’s grandchildren may have an edge in the future because of the work I am doing now. Or else someone else will.