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The Vigour of the Breed

Appears in
top 1000The Rice Book
The Rice Book

By Sri Owen

Published 1993

  • About

First, there is the risk that attends too great reliance on a few varieties of any food crop. The Irish potato famine of the 1840s showed what can happen. As Eugene and Marja Anderson put it, in their paper in Food in Chinese Culture,

In a southern Chinese peasant plot, before the days of miracle grains, chance pollination and natural selection for diversity probably guaranteed that no two plants were genetically identical, or at least that a field would be a marvelous genetic mosaic โ€“ allowing resistant strains to develop naturally, heterosis to occur, and microhabitat differences to encourage microdifferentiation in rices.

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