I’ve seen plenty of herms from regular seeds. Every season.
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Making an S1 would reduce the genetic diversity, Making a regular F2 will also reduce the genetic diversity. This is often a good thing if you are looking for specific traits.
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Not at all, each to their own. I make reg seeds and i make fem seeds. Sorry if you feel my arguments aren’t intelligent. There are no real scientific reasons why regs are better, especially as we grow this plant for smoking quality and only females can demonstrate their smoking quality unless you reverse a male and if you are prepared to do that then what’s the problem with fems?
VG
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Funny, here I thought we were basically agreeing, but you picked the one part of my message you’ve had an opposite experience from to focus on and appear to be trying to turn it into an argument with me too. 
FWIW, I also agree with you on the F2 = S1 bit, provided you qualify that it only applies to “true” F1 hybrids. I know, not nearly so interesting since we can’t argue about it… 
Just too many arguments in this thread, I’m gonna go find somewhere else to be.
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My personal experience tells me otherwise.
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not trying to have an argument, trying to point out that beyond ease and convenience, there are no real scientific reasons as to why regs are better for cannabis.
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IMO;
A great male is better to have/keep around than a great (female) cut.
It is harder to find a great male than a great female.
I have found and tossed just as many herms and messed up plants in fem beans as I have in reg beans. The fem beans mean I have no easy way to breed, forced to S1 or hope the sister is close to as good if you wanna keep the line at all pure.
It’s harder to reverse certain plants with no guaranteed outcome. It’s the same outcome as any other breeding pair. Selection matters, and I don’t mean how dank it smells/smokes. Progeny testing matters. Mashing two girls isn’t automatically better than a m/f pair, but you need good male selection. You cannot just pick any male to use the same way you wouldn’t pick any girl to use.
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If you have a great male, you can S1 the male and still have reg beans.
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Nor is there that fems are better when we talk about breeding. It may be the faster way, but maybe not always the best.
It’s not a matter of “better than”, but more about context, what you have in hands and what you can do with it. If you didn’t find a good male, well, then fem is the fastest way. But you could bx it too. You want to unpack the genetic of your good cut to understand it better, well, self it or use a male you know by heart.
I still believe (so no science in that) that when you reverse a female, you’re still hoping it has enough of an hormonal imbalance to be able to produce pollen. Even if carefully selected. I have hard time believing it won’t spread to its progeny. But that’s just an opinion.
In any way, when selfing you’re inbreeding way faster than when you use a male.
Science is too far away to understand cannabis sexuality at the moment to tell there’s a scientific answer to this never ending discussion that periodically pops up 
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I like the hunt. I’ll chuck and maybe breed at some point, but finding special cultivars that are worth working with is not a simple task.
I love it when people find the hobby and I would never speak for anybody but myself, so don’t take it the wrong way when I say growing bud for buds sake is boring to me. It’s a very easy plant to grow, and I like to create problems and find solutions, so I grow lots of stuff. Hell, I just built a bunch of SIPs to throw in my old mother tent so I can flower some supposedly lanky sativas (Mango C5 Haze) alongside my hydro tent full of Chem Fuego.
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awesome strain name dude
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Can’t resist ^^
Sequencing buddy. The male’s sexual chromosome is just bigger. I don’t mean a lot for individuals alleles, it mean a lot for the recombinations available when you retire the males from the equation.
I don’t see what make so easier the selection with a reversal program, in practice it’s the reverse. To output a high grade fem, there is a lot more operational steps than with natural seeds. Starting by two totally different selections for the pollen donor obviously ^^
“Smoking informations” are shared by two group of traits : the floral traits and the chemotype. It’s not a secret for anyone i guess ^^
Dealing with the quality of males in term of floral grade / chemotypes variations is a simple question of momentum, come on.
In the way that the job is entirely done. No selection, no specimens to sort by sex, a certain type of weed is already set and predictable in term of grade … the market of clones will never die.
Genetically, only the selection make a difference. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the cuts are not selected for their genetical value and are for most of them coming from a simple quantitative screening. Just like the average stoner in a tent, that make a motherplant to smoke all the season.
I don’t get the idea. It’s not possible to sample your females without reversal ? ^^ I’m sure not, just curious to know the genuine idea behind the lefty expression.
If you have the power to stabilize a set of traits (let’s say two dozens in general to define a strain) in a single shot, with only a sprayer … your catalog is already out of stock all the year ^^
To uniformize the fem releases with the heterosis is a different thing that reorganizing totally the genotype around homozygous traits ^^ Chems or not, it take years and many parallel lines to be really done and “stamped” professionally.
Because after a good half century of backward, i think it’s clear that fems will not renew the fundamentals lines that still recycled in loop today. The hunting of all pre-fem era sources is raging right now more than ever, with the ambivalence to read constantly the reverse in the web noise ^^
Just an F2, true. With the same rules of segregations, but with half the material than a traditional M.F1 x F.F1.
Selfing is a drastically more thin funnel, and it become exponential with each subsequent generation due to the sudden restriction that has to face the DNA without any time to let the code rebalance itself, with the magic of the double haploid combo.
This pressure don’t depend on what you’re doing, but more on how you adapt your selection to such a pressure. You don’t have the virtually infinite time that you have naturally, when you produce a new genotype from a phenotype … you don’t have much the right to the error or the freedom to play with the potentiometers to rebalance. At most you have three generations to “close” a release.
With reversal, the work should be done already BEFORE the spray. Specially because the big difference of pressure between a line suddenly “arid” genetically and a line that can adapt and react with a constant haploid injection/blend.
Magic statement buddy, the definition of a “true breeding” line (that don’t exist in my native language, for real) is a debate on itself ^^ I personally don’t sequence my plants with bionic eyes ^^
It’s totally possible to create “clones-in-seeds” S1 fems without using any stabilized work. It’s just a matter of methodology and goals.
Now if it’s to be the 1000th to offer the same thing at the same grade than others, not sure it’s an asset in a saturated offer. Just quicksilver with the right network.
I never, and i weight my words carefully, never met a breeder with a decent momentum on the market that don’t piss on fems and that don’t consider them as sub-product.
But scientists proud of their incapacity to be competitive (because they fail in the Truth), a shit ton.
True, heterosis don’t make any difference on how is made the line.
Drastically more, by the insane restriction of the starting point. But it’s for long term maintenance, not hybridism.
Now if you never need to push more than a couple generations, it’s too fast to make a difference for the vast majority of stoners. Specially today. Relative case.
I’ve never read anything scientific on this matter ^^ I’m not closed like an oyster either, if i missed one important paper or experiment i will be glad to look at this.
I don’t know what you tried to write, but i’m sure it was not this highly contradictory sentence ^^
There is no really true or false F1, but more an infinite panel of degrees of heterosis (expected). Even initially from the same historic line, you can get heterosis between a NL and an Afghani#1. And not a bland one.
In agronomy most of lines are herms (outside canna), so the term “true F1” take a totally different value.
Now this example with polyhybridism don"t have any sense buddy.
Let’s take a di-hybrid NL worked then for purple colors and CBN levels. Two traits worked, it’s a strict case of poly-hybridism.
If your cross this line on itself, the progeny still a polyhybrid (di-hybrid) and an IBL also.
Polyhybridism status is just how many trait you work at a time, no matter the status of the line ^^
True in both cases, but the genetic tension is totally different. Autosomes put aside, to don’t appear to radical ^^
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Operationally, to produce seeds, it is more complicated for fems but I never argued against that. I said it may be easier to select for specific traits in the realm of reversals as you can include sensory (and scientific, if you have access to testing) data from female flowers in your selection process.
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If you spend the time to reverse the male(s) you’d have the same data…
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That’s not necessary easier, and doesn’t create a financially or medically or at least recreationally stimulating byproduct for your efforts!
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To answer the original question, I would say that OP’s perception of the regs/fems ratio is skewed from spending a lot of time on OG because we like regs and breeders who make regs. If you go to most of the big “commercial” breeders or seedbanks, it’s fems fems fems. I’m talking Barney’s, the other Dutch places, Humboldt Seed Co., FastBuds, etc. So my short answer to the actual question (IMO) of “why so many fems” is that fem auto (or even triploid 
) is the endgame for any operation seeking to make money off of selling seeds. I’m against such anti-consumer practices purely on principle. I don’t even know enough about the genetics end to make an argument there other than taking a huge puff of dank ass weed and saying “regs are what nature intended, maaan.”
Beyond that, I’ve been listening to a lot of old episodes of the Pot Cast lately and in most episodes this topic comes up in one way or another. Basically, “are fems something you see yourself doing?” or a variation of that. Off the top of my head (and forgive me if I’m wrong), JJ/TopDawg, Bodhi, Subcool (RIP), Shanitbaba, Bob Hemphill, and Karma all basically answered the same way which is that they can see the appeal for some breeders or growers, but they prefer regs and will continue selling all or mostly regs. Those names are some true pillars of the community so I think their answers speak volumes.
Personally, I started out buying fems and autos because outside of OG those get recommended to beginners all the time. I’ve only completed 3 full grows but I’m done with anything but regs from here on out I think. Plant counts don’t bother me much, and I do short enough veg time that the extra medium/space/nutes taken up by males doesn’t bother me at all. I’m not growing for yield/$ and if I was of course I would use clones anyway. The cops/regulators aren’t knocking at my door to check how many plants I have. I guess I get it if you are in that situation for some odd reason, but if not just stick to the classic 3 rules and grow as many plants as you can fit, cull the males if you’re looking for sinse, and call it a day!
Thanks for reading my blog post lmao.
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First off, nice post.
Simply that you can smoke a female plant to evaluate its potency etc but not a male plant (unless you reverse it to a female which is even more complicated than reversing a female plant )
indeed, i was just pointing out that any trait is more likely to breed true in an S1 than its parent (by about 27%iirc ) just as an inbred regular line would be as you went to F2, F3 etc
i wasn’t claiming an S1 breeds true for all traits
yes but feminizing is more than just selfing and S1s. One of my best crosses is a fem -
White Rhino x Bubba
VG
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you buy some Florel and you spray it on the male every couple days…
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Actually, my question was why so many REGs…I expected many more FEMs
I know, I was just making the point that from where I sit, the question I have is “why so many fems?” Sorry if that was worded in a confusing way.
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