this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Hemp / marijuana is arguably the most successful plant at this. It enjoys a high degree of biodiversity where as most plants we cultivate suffer from monoculture problems. Why is hemp / marijuana so successful? Probably because of its multiple uses. It makes strong fibers, you can make milk from it, you can make all sorts of consumer products like lip balm and hair conditioner, and you can get fucking ripped bro
Both by using it as a protien supplement and a psychoactive chemical.
See also Brassica Oleracea aka wild cabbage which we've cultivated into cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, collard greens, savoy cabbage, kohlrabi, gai lan.. etc
we've even cultivated it into magical artefacts, romanesco broccoli
I love the texture of cooked romanesco, it's as if potatoes and broccoli got together and decided to have a fractal baby
Fun fact, apparently nature can only do fractals 4 levels deep. This works for romanesco, fern, and tons of others. I am yet to find an outlier.
From what I can find there are 700 strains of cannabis
There's 4000 varieties of potato
Where did you find that about hemp? I can only find info about recreational marijuana and can't find anything about agricultural or industrial hemp. And the recreational marijuana numbers I could find are all just like "top 30 strains to try today"
Leafly lists 6,822 cannabis strains. Though 'strains' or more aptly cultivars are often not reflective of the actual underlying chemical nature of the plant [source]. They are ultimately not very meaningful in general.
Based on this database, Europe has 104 varieties of hemp registered.
Canada has 87 but there is probably overlap.
Though potatoes and cannabis aren't really a fair comparison for many reasons. There are a lot of different species of potatoes with major chromosomal differences but cannabis only has 3 species.
It's also not really fair because potatos are one of the easiest plants to monocrop with how you can propagate them without seeds.
Yeah its a major problem in particular with the Idaho Gold being far and a way the most commonly grown potato to meet McDonald's demand for long fries that stick up out of the little fry nest