Landrace Strains: Populations Shaped by People and Place

Landraces are not uniform. They are not static. They are dynamic populations with internal genetic diversity, and that diversity is exactly why they persisted long before modern breeding and indoor cultivation. Confusing landraces with fixed “pure strains” obscures how genetics, history, and cannabis breeding have unfolded.

This is especially visible in how names like ‘Acapulco Gold’ and ‘Panama Red’ are remembered. These are often described as classic “landrace strains,” but they were never single, uniform genetic entities. They were informal names applied to Cannabis coming out of specific regions, carrying reputations shaped by local cultivation practices, post-harvest handling, transport, and storytelling.

Within those regions, plants varied widely in morphology, flowering time, and chemistry, as you would expect from open-pollinated populations.

Stories of a Landrace Strain

Similar stories apply to names like ‘Colombian Gold’, ‘Thai’, ‘Afghani’, ‘Hindu Kush’, and ‘Malawi’, which functioned as regional descriptors for diverse local populations long before they were treated as discrete strains. What became fixed in memory was the name and narrative, not the genetics.

At the same time, landraces remain critically important because they allow us to access diversity that has been reduced through modern breeding. Much of the diversity present in today’s breeding pools traces back to a relatively small number of collections brought to market by legacy figures such as David Watson and Nevil Schoenmakers.

This brings me to a conversation that sits at the center of how these terms continue to get tangled. In a personal communication in June 2023, David Watson wrote:

“I think you were correct, about landraces. National Institute of Agricultural Botany. An ecotype is a wild plant that has historically occurred in one area, and over time has become adapted to that specific area (soil type, climate, altitude, etc.). A landrace is the same, except it has also been cultivated by farmers and become domesticated. I believe that the seeds I collected in Kashmir were ecotypes. I mistakenly called them a landrace. Live and learn…”

Even in this conversation, after further research and reflection, I don’t believe he got it quite right.

The issue isn’t whether those Kashmir plants were ecotypes or landraces. The issue is that ecotype is not a category that replaces landrace, feral, or wild. It is a descriptor of local adaptation.

Ecotype vs. Landrace Strains

Just as phenotype describes physical traits, morphotype describes form, and chemotype describes chemical expression, ecotype describes a genetically distinct population that has evolved heritable adaptations to a specific set of environmental pressures, such as altitude, latitude, temperature, rainfall, day length, soil type, or local pest pressure.

But those descriptors do not replace categories like species, landrace, or cultivar. They overlay them. A population can be wild, feral, or a landrace and also be an ecotype. Calling a population an ecotype does not exclude it from being a landrace, and calling it a landrace does not exclude it from being an ecotype. Those terms answer different questions.

The Boxes We Create in Cannabis & Nature

Part of why this took me a long time to wrap my head around is that I’ve always struggled with the boxes we force nature into for the sake of classification.

I failed organismic biology three times before finally scraping by with an acceptable grade in the last semester of my undergraduate studies, largely because rote memorization and rigid categories never helped me understand how biology works in nature.

What I understood was that there are likely very few remaining truly wild populations that were free from long-term gene flow with domesticated genotypes.

Cannabis produces enormous amounts of pollen, capable of traveling long distances (Clarke 1977), and pollen dispersal over potentially hundreds of kilometers makes genetic isolation extraordinarily difficult (Faegri et al. 1989; Small 2015). Given thousands of years of human movement, cultivation, and trade, most cannabis populations labeled “wild” are better understood as feral or landrace.

Even formal definitions reflect how narrow the truly wild category is.

“Wild Cannabis refers to populations of Cannabis sativa that may represent genuinely indigenous, undomesticated plants growing in their native habitats. Unlike feral or escaped plants which derive from cultivated stock, wild populations would be ancestral genepools, unchanged by human selection.” – Zomia Collective

By that definition, truly wild cannabis populations are likely rare or nonexistent. This is where precision matters.

• A landrace is a population shaped over many generations by both people and place. Humans planted, harvested, saved seed, and selected useful traits, while climate, soils, pests, and seasons applied natural selection.
• Feral plants are descendants of cultivated plants that escaped human care and now survive on their own.
• Heirlooms are human-maintained varieties passed down through families or communities, typically more uniform and preservation-focused than landraces.

Ecotype describes adaptation to environment, not domestication status. Wild-growing simply means a plant is growing without cultivation right now and says nothing about origin. These are not rigid boxes. Plant populations exist along a continuum… wild to landrace to heirloom to cultivar, with feral populations scattered throughout.

Cannabis has been moved, traded, and replanted for thousands of years, making clean boundaries the exception rather than the rule.