Megan Lynch (she/her)For all that people go wild over marker-assisted breeding, the leading avocado and the leading almond cultivars in CA are both the results of planting out seedlings. They were chance seedling accidents.
I've known the 'Hass' story for nearly 2 decades, but just tonight finally read the story of 'Nonpareil'. In both cases, the bonanza parent tree was nearly grafted to something else. It's only because each grower was delayed grafting all of their seedlings that the superior qualities of the seedling had a chance to be discovered.
Both of these chance seedlings' clones have dominated the market in CA and often abroad for many decades.
John@ml That’s fascinating and inspiring! In general, it’s exciting just how much room there is for food improvement on even an individual level, at least outside of the cereals.
@thoroughburro Oh, there's definitely room for improvement. And marker-assisted breeding is not useless by any means. It's just that so much has gone over to molecular breeding that the importance of germplasm collections, and planting out masses of seedlings and seeing what you get has been underplayed for a while. In my opinion.