This is the point. These days it seems anyone with 2 tents and a dozen seeds present themselves as “breeders”. This is most evident in places like IG and FB. What is the standard?
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To get my big Sioux Roma tomatoes a little sweeter for tomato paste type recipes took 3 rows (@40 plants) and three full growing seasons.
With cannabis you have the advantage of indoor and a lot faster seasons (3 to 4 months including seed drying I think) but as said by Greg green and a few others, 25 plants minimum for decent selection.
I’d say if I’m buying these seeds at premium pricing, I’m expecting a breeder to have at least 50 plants with a minimum of f4 and an f5 test run.
2 to 3 years for a new strain???
Sounds brutal, but to me if I’m paying 100 bucks a pack or more that would be a bare minimum in effort.
Those times get cut down if you’re working with two stable strains but crossing two drastically different polyhybrids would likely double that.
I’m no expert by any means and a cannabis begginer in my estimation so correct me if I’m wrong.
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I think this is where @Skiball thoughts come into play, and its the driving force behind most seed sales nowadays.
Pollen chuckers can produce a legitimate product that deserves a place in the market.
And some breeders spend years on a project that isn’t worth the time they put in.
(Off topic: Your big Sioux Roma tomatoes are sticking in my mind like bad pop music, lmao. Been far too long since I’ve had a garden fresh tomato. Store-bought is a sick joke.)
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Well said! My feelings exactly! There should be some standards by which one can make an informed purchase when paying $60 - $100 a pack. It’s like “rolling the dice” every time.
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a canadian grower was issued breeders rights for a sativa strain named ‘Big C’ so it must have been a stable and unique strain. breeders rights (or varietal rights) is like a patent or copyright. it must be new, distinct, uniform, and stable.
https://news.lift.co/canada-copyright-cannabis/
Plant breeding - Wikipedia’_rights
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Interesting that a “Chris Griffin” who attended the University of Toronto also happens to work at the CFIA.
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/chris-griffin-b7599491
They cheer legalization, but force corporatization.
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wow it’s probably the same guy too, friggin swindlers and crooks the whole government n their cannabis industry.
i think its super cool when breeders state the filial generation on their packages (like @LED_Seedz) there’s some companies which i don’t even think test or run their gear themselves, they just hit a female with their male and release the seeds immediately
the phylos galaxy is super cool, its a big interactive map of all the genetics in their database (the public data anyways) and you can see common links and connections between different strains. there really needs to be some standardization in cannabis industry. but at least phylos could likely confirm if what you have is actually what you think you have etc.
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I googled the guy’s name because I wanted to see if I recognize his face from growshops, etc. Nope, he’s some sneaky politburo pencil-pusher.
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I only buy seeds of what I have seen test runs on or even seen great reviews of in the forums.
I am at the stage though of giving up completely buying seeds, paying $100 or more for a pack is just bullshit especially if it is the result of a pollen chuck.
I don’t think you should put a name on a strain unless it is completely stable as someone said above F4-F5 minimum
It only takes 2 seeds to make 1000… lets all just OverGrow because that new hype strain is no better than what you or one of your mates have in the stable already.
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True Dat! My feelings exactly! $100+ for a pack of seeds is a “red line” for me. 
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I always thought that if you cross two F1 siblings you get essentially random plants from the seeds and needed to cross back to stabilise the line.
I would think the seeds from breeding 2 “shitstorm” plants would result in essentially random plants with wildly varying characteristics.
To get homogeneous plants surely you would have to breed the F1 shitstorm with the F1 catdog, not from plants grown from seeds from shitstorm x shitstorm and catdog x catdog.
F1 still applies to my mind as seeds from F1 crosses (between siblings) don’t breed true.
F1 x F1 when not siblings should (AFAIK) produce homogeneous offspring
We seem to have left the land of stable breeding lines and are now in the land of random lucky crosses in a lot of cases.
If everyone was breeding like this then the plant itself as we know it would most definitely be in trouble but luckily, we are not homogeneous in our breeding methods 
Someone somewhere will be going to the effort of keeping stable breeding lines. They may save the day at some point in the future…
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After a 15 year break I looked at a seedbank (which reads like a dessert menu) and realized I could create a strain called cookies glue trainwreck kush. Claim it tastes like marzipan cookies with a cotton candy aftertaste, finishes in 50 days, yields 5 grams a watt and tests at 39% THC. Sell them and retire comfortably. If I made an auto version I’d have enough to buy that 150’ yacht I have been eyeing up.
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yes i think that’s why F1s are more desirable than F2s but the example you were quoting said when breeding 2 unrelated seedlines not siblings. F2s seem like they’d be fun to hunt through though maybe you’d find a cut even better than the F1.
so F2s are bad to breed with because of the genetic variation? what if you bred F2s with F2s with F2s would you be creating some genetic needle in a haystack? punnett squares and breeding seem pretty complicated to me, what are some good materials to read to learn more? watts flower & vegetable plant breeding 1980 a good place to start?
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I got a lot of good info from Robert Connell Clarke’s book
Marijuana Botany: An Advanced Study: The Propagation and Breeding of Distinctive Cannabis
It can be a little dry as it was written decades ago but it has a good solid breeding section.
If there are characteristics in an F1 you want but you breed siblings that are F1 to make an F2 generation then only 1/4 of the seeds will breed true to the F1 generation and if you then cross two F2 seeds the chances of you getting a cross which has all the characteristics you want is 1/16.
Releasing in the F2 generation instead of the F1 would mean only 1/4 of the plants carry the dominants you want. 1/2 will have some of the dominants to varying degree and 1/4 will be nothing like their parents.
OP should make it more clear whether the seeds released are the first cross from a stable breeding line (F1), a cross from siblings that are F1 (F2) or a cross from F2 siblings (F3). I suspect they are confused as to what those mean as bigdog x fatcat should be F1, not F3…
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Banana plants are all clones of one lucky plantain mutation which made a sweet, seedless plantain. It is not a plant which has been bred over time to be like that. There are NO banana seeds.
It is a good example of one danger of going down the lucky clone route.
There is now a fungus which lives on Bananas (and kills them) and they cannot breed in any resistance because they are seedless clones so in the near future, bananas might either go up a LOT in price or just disappear altogether.
If we lose our breeding lines, we will have no way to breed in resistance to any fungus, or other pathogen while keeping good plants, if they are all lucky crosses of F1 plants we would lose all that plant breeding and have to go back to old breeding lines and rebuild…
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That was sarcasm, yes I know. That’s what makes it a great example.
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hahhahahaah I was just gonna say to Microdoser, are you sureeeeee.
There are also different types of bananas. I think only the newer commercial type doesn’t have seeds, but the rest do.
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Soooo much wrong information in this thread I just had to walk away.
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Commercially grown bananas that are cultivated specifically for consumption do not have seeds. Over time, they have been modified to have three sets of genes instead of two (triploid) and produce no seeds.
If you want to grow banana plants from seed, be aware that the resulting fruit will not be like those you buy at the grocers. They will contain seeds and, depending upon the variety, might be so large that the fruit is difficult to get to.
Bananas grown from seed are normally for ornamental purposes, we do however offer a few varieties that will produce edible bananas ( with seeds of course ), and they have a wonderful flavor superior to store bananas.
Bananas are one of the more difficult seeds to germinate in terms of time and effort required, especially compared to vegetable and flower seeds most gardeners are familiar with, but they can be germinated at a decent rate if one is diligent.
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