The only way to find anything stodgier than the way vineyards cultivate grapes would be to go to a bridge party with the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Twenty cultivars out of thousands available are used in the vineyards for wine-making. Most and maybe all cultivation is done via cuttings and cloning which is the perfect way to ensure there will never be any genetic recombination. That's fine if it is your purpose simply to propagate an existing high-quality grape but it's worthless if your purpose is to improve that cultivar or create another one.
Growers observe in new vines whether they have the taste, how is their disease resistance, etc. This technique was all very well centuries ago but more sophisticated options are available.
Reefer is cultivated similarly and it runs the same risk of being taken over by the DAR Bridge Club now that there are huge outfits farming it professionally. The risk being that some famous cultivars will get the primary focus and there will be a repetition of what happens with wine cultivation and a great many other crops, for that matter.
This is not a prelude to genetic modification although I have no particular reason to flog GMO. The problem isn't so much that they make any GMO products but rather they make them to the exclusion of others. Corporate profits gets involved and then you get legal constraints against other strains of various crops (e.g. tomatoes in the EU, etc). The problem isn't necessarily inherent in the GMO product but rather what corporations do with it. There's a whole article on that and I'm not interested in writing it.
Degreed geneticists have been bringing some scientific methodology to the breeding techniques the vineyards have been employing and this is through observing the grape's genome, identifying important markers, etc and, thus, detecting early whether any cultivar has real potential. There is no GMO recombination but rather applied Mendelian genetics and the result of about twelve years of research may be available this year or next.
This is the same reason Australia loved my ol' Dad ... bullions and bullions of sheep (say that like Carl Sagan). His knowledge of genetics was helpful to them in their breeding programs and this was crucial as Merino wool is prized. For Australia, this is major stuff. This led to my ol' Dad's work in population genetics which is mapping genetic changes for a population rather than an individual. He programmed that on a computer and, whammo, genetics rock star.
(Ed: you mean to tell me he wrote the seminal work on computer simulation of this and it was all from a flock of fookin' sheep?)
Baa. (Yep in sheep language)
He really was a rock star as he went on three world tours after that with all of them asking, "Alex, tell us how you did it!"
He brought a Lionel train set back from America and the locomotive was almost too big for a greedy little tyke to carry. That's when we knew for sure he was a god.
Twenty cultivars out of thousands available are used in the vineyards for wine-making. Most and maybe all cultivation is done via cuttings and cloning which is the perfect way to ensure there will never be any genetic recombination. That's fine if it is your purpose simply to propagate an existing high-quality grape but it's worthless if your purpose is to improve that cultivar or create another one.
Growers observe in new vines whether they have the taste, how is their disease resistance, etc. This technique was all very well centuries ago but more sophisticated options are available.
Reefer is cultivated similarly and it runs the same risk of being taken over by the DAR Bridge Club now that there are huge outfits farming it professionally. The risk being that some famous cultivars will get the primary focus and there will be a repetition of what happens with wine cultivation and a great many other crops, for that matter.
This is not a prelude to genetic modification although I have no particular reason to flog GMO. The problem isn't so much that they make any GMO products but rather they make them to the exclusion of others. Corporate profits gets involved and then you get legal constraints against other strains of various crops (e.g. tomatoes in the EU, etc). The problem isn't necessarily inherent in the GMO product but rather what corporations do with it. There's a whole article on that and I'm not interested in writing it.
Degreed geneticists have been bringing some scientific methodology to the breeding techniques the vineyards have been employing and this is through observing the grape's genome, identifying important markers, etc and, thus, detecting early whether any cultivar has real potential. There is no GMO recombination but rather applied Mendelian genetics and the result of about twelve years of research may be available this year or next.
This is the same reason Australia loved my ol' Dad ... bullions and bullions of sheep (say that like Carl Sagan). His knowledge of genetics was helpful to them in their breeding programs and this was crucial as Merino wool is prized. For Australia, this is major stuff. This led to my ol' Dad's work in population genetics which is mapping genetic changes for a population rather than an individual. He programmed that on a computer and, whammo, genetics rock star.
(Ed: you mean to tell me he wrote the seminal work on computer simulation of this and it was all from a flock of fookin' sheep?)
Baa. (Yep in sheep language)
He really was a rock star as he went on three world tours after that with all of them asking, "Alex, tell us how you did it!"
He brought a Lionel train set back from America and the locomotive was almost too big for a greedy little tyke to carry. That's when we knew for sure he was a god.
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