ABSTRACT
Crop breeding is as old as domesticated plants. When our forebears nurtured and selected desirable plants from a few favored wild species
and eventually formed the first landraces, they practiced crop breeding identical in its fundamentals to today’s “scientific” crop breeding. Dur ing the past 10,000 years, farmer-breeders have developed untold num bers of landraces (farmer varieties) and thousands of them are still on hand, although the numbers are shrinking rapidly as professionallybred varieties answering the demands of the marketplace replace the landraces in many parts of the world.
