Screening pollen donors for potency?

In the old days, when I planted a bunch of bag seed I would ask a friend or two to fire up some of the dried male leaves to see if any of the males were desirable breeding material. My fellow cave dwellers were glad to be my guinea pigs, because it was really hard to score consistently back then in the Lone Star State. When you can't get flowers, you try to fill the gaps with shake.

Now, alas, I live in California where every pot head I know gets their stuff from a dispensary, so they can usually do better than dried leaves. So, most likely, they're not going to want to help me test my males. I'd do it myself, but not sure I would be reliable given my tolerance is way up by now.

So, I've always wondered how the "real" breeders handle this. Would you send the male stuff (leaves, not pollen) to a lab to get tested? Do you have your own test monkeys? Or do you just ignore the question of what a male contributes to potency and focus on picking healthy-looking plants that grow short and bushy?

I would choose the stankiest and fastest vigor. I could never see myself testing males potency unless I was a super breeder with $$.

Smell, structure, growth, lots of different things. If you can ever find something that puts on a massive amount of male flowers, that's a good sign, and a excellent sign is the rare male that will actually produce a visual amount of resin on the leaves. A frosty male is always a keeper, but often times you are looking for something that will compensate for characteristics you don't care for in your female, as well as increase the potency,yield, and give an earlier harvest season whenever possible.

this is a great question i think...i think the answer is a little bit of everything you suggested though friend...that and alot of appearance...shoot for the males that show more things than just potency or trichomes...of course you want to look first for alot of trich production on the males as that will obviously yield better potency genes than males without trichs...but also look for things like strong, rapid growth, big healthy leaves....look for the rings around the stalk by the stem for bud support/vigor....small node spacing, the smaller the better of course which will add to density....then from there maybe try to find one or two test monkeys that are willing to do it...maybe most do get there stuff from disp. but there are times when ppl are broke or just need or are in a tight situation, give them a half oz of leaves and tell them, look...when ur out or desperate or have no other way...smoke some of this and let me know what you think....then try to test some for yourself as well...regardless of tolerance...look at it like this....if your tolerance is high like you think and it does get you high well then it must be good right? then like you said, maybe even send the very best to the lab for testing that way your not spending crazy trying to test male leaves, only send the best, sort of like a process of elimination...i dont know just my 2 cents i guess, but either way, really great question...but IMO...i go for a little bit of everything. vigor/strength, bushy/dense, healthy, potency, short and stocky etc etc the list goes on, either way, best of luck

The only way to accurately judge a male plant is to smoke his daughters.

Until genomics allows our industry the same respect as any other legitimate business we can test progeny. I have seen all types of male. Even the lacklusted dudes can pump out gems.
The Duck is right...mostly. one also has to KNOW the mom. This helps in determining charicteristic of genetic expression one may expext on the other hybrids with same father.
Just my 2cents

Peace

Absolutely. Known mothers should be used and ideally a few different ones for each group of males being tested. Unfortunately plant counts get huge that way. Selecting good females is much easier. Their offspring should still be tested to see if they make good parents but it is easier to do a fast screening.

the funny thing is almost no other industry selects and breeds like cannabis growers anymore they all use much more advanced techniques. being underground for so long has kind of screwed us over.

Galvatron said:

the funny thing is almost no other industry selects and breeds like cannabis growers anymore they all use much more advanced techniques. being underground for so long has kind of screwed us over.

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Given the efficacy and quality of a lot of the bud out there nowadays (particularly if you know who's who), and the selection of quality growing traits, I'd say the underground methods are as good or better than ever.

-spek

I would really like to know what you mean, Galvatron. Seedbanks sell mostly F1 hybrids, which is basically what elsewhere is done, especially with strong outbreeders. Obviously the numbers in selections will be somewhere else, but still, the systems should be similar. What is missing in our game, sees to me, are openpolinated varieties - the oldest kind of seedstocks.

I really wonder, how the breeding would change with all the resources regular breeders have, anyone sees into those industries enough to have an idea?

ltecato said:

In the old days, when I planted a bunch of bag seed I would ask a friend or two to fire up some of the dried male leaves to see if any of the males were desirable breeding material. My fellow cave dwellers were glad to be my guinea pigs, because it was really hard to score consistently back then in the Lone Star State. When you can't get flowers, you try to fill the gaps with shake.

So, I've always wondered how the "real" breeders handle this. Would you send the male stuff (leaves, not pollen) to a lab to get tested? Do you have your own test monkeys? Or do you just ignore the question of what a male contributes to potency and focus on picking healthy-looking plants that grow short and bushy?

Click to expand...

Your methods weren't that far off from what some well known breeders do to test male potency.
If you're familiar with Neville Schoemaker, from what I've read, he had two methods for testing his males.
First, he would collect a bunch of pollen, smoke it, and see what the effects were (similar to what you had your guinea pigs do).
The second, was reversing his males, into females.
He'd flower and smoke them to see what medicinal properties they contained, and might pass on, when bred.