What if you have 10,000 seeds? You couldn't possibly grow them all out. You can't spot keepers in seedling stage, but you can remove the plants that exhibit unwanted or less desirable traits early on. Whorled phyllotaxy/triploid for example. If you sprout more seeds than you need, you can remove those, and those show right away. If you only sprout as many as you will flower, you're stuck growing them. It's a numbers game and the more you start with the more choosey you can be and the more likey you will end up with phenos that exhibit traits that you want.
We’re not really arguing anything different, go back and check the response chain. OP is thinking that the heaviest yielder can be spotted in veg and took your response as support of that belief.
Yes, if you pop 100, need 100 to fill a room, and toss 20 for whatever reason, you will come up short. That is obvious.
This has “stumbled” away from my point that “you cannot properly identify your keeper without blooming it” and towards “but you can identify nasty crooked little midget dicks”. Which takes me on a tangent...
I’ve told this story of “disdain, to love, then loss” several times here. Several years ago I received a group of clones (~60, representing 6 strains, maybe a couple more, memory). From them I have my Gelato, GSC, GG4, and the mother of my (“The White”x unknown OG)xGG4. There were also Skywalker OG’s in that group, one that was piss poor in veg and did not get moved into bloom and transplanted along with the rest. While tossing the few runts, I decided to take the largest of them (an ~18’ Skywalker) and throw it in a little 3gal to see what it would do. It was a noodle, sad, nothing to clone from this one.
Half way through bloom I realized that a huge error had been made. The other “Skywalker’s” were instead some average OG (piss poor in comparison against my own “old school” OG’s), but that runt had blown up, stretched, branched out hard, and was stacked like a brick house. She was amazing, the only Skywalker in the bunch, and yielded a large amount of the best Skywalker I’ve ever seen (not tooting my horn, just praising that particular cut). I reveg’d, but to my dismay, none of the clones cut from her rooted.
In my last been pop, Scooby Snacks #7 was the smallest female in the bean run (I always number according to size). It is now (first set of clones cut from original), by far, the largest. In fact, it was the tallest plant in the veg room (~30 strains). I’m running them all again to be sure, but the keepers so far are #4 (Face Off OG dom), #6 (Cookie dom), and #7 is a possibility (OG appearance, with purple marbling). Literally, the numbers are “telling”. 3 and 4 were both tall OG’s, but 4 was better, by “light years”. 5 and 6 are both Cookie phenos, but 6 is the clear winner. #1 and 2 were the only males that didn’t show prior to bloom. Had I chose my cuts in veg based on size, I would have tossed my keepers, and possibly held on to a couple males. Not making this up, check the Archive thread. Wrote about all of the phenos in detail several weeks ago.
Same bean pop session included Purple Portal testers from Ocean Grown. Runt females #4 & 5 from the bean run have yielded clones that are indistinguishable from #1-3.
So, toss the ugly ones with wonky growth, sure. We can be somewhat confident that those without “arms & legs” will not make the draft. Selecting keeper(s) prior to sampling the finished product, no.
