Landrace

A landrace is a crop that has never been through a breeder’s hands. It is a local population, kept by farmers who save seed from their own fields year after year, until it has grown suited to its place: its climate, its pests, its soil, and the uses its growers want from it. In cannabis the word names the old populations of the regions that grew the plant for hashish, ganja or fibre long before anyone sold seed in packets, and that are now, in many places, disappearing.

A country breed

The word is German, Landrasse, literally “country breed”. The first known reference to landraces as a genetic resource was made at an agriculture and forestry congress in Vienna in 1890. Kurt von Rümker defined the term in 1908; U. J. Mansholt described landraces in 1909 as more stable and more resistant to hard conditions than bred cultivars, though less productive, and apt to change when moved somewhere else. English took the word in the early 1930s, through a pig: the Danish Landrace, a breed of lop-eared swine.

Term	What it means
Landrace	A local population shaped by its place and its farmers, not by formal breeding
Cultivar	A variety bred to a standard and kept uniform
Farmers’ variety	A local variety that has not been formally bred; it can include landraces
Autochthonous landrace	One grown in the same place for a long time
Allochthonous landrace	One introduced more recently
Accession	In seed banks, a sample recorded at one place and time

Mass selection

What makes a cannabis population a landrace, according to the conservation database Landrace.wiki, is how its seed is kept. Farmers save seed in bulk from an open-pollinated field rather than from a few chosen plants. The result is recognisably local, but never uniform: it keeps some genetic diversity, gives a steady harvest in bad years and a moderate one in good years, and usually carries a local name and a known use. In the Indian subcontinent, for example, broad-leafed populations of the plant botanists call Cannabis indica were grown for charas.

Some of the best-known commercial strains came from them: those sold as kush were bred in California from the 1970s from landraces of the Hindu Kush, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Lost to hybrids

The same trade threatens them. Hybrids grown in a traditional region can cross with the local plants or replace them outright, and once a population has been reduced to a handful of seeds, its diversity goes quickly. Prohibition has done the rest: Landrace.wiki notes that eradication campaigns hit the old growing regions again and again, and disrupted the passing on of growers’ knowledge. In Thailand, Cambodia and Laos it is unclear how much of the material described in a survey of 1975 still survives.

Morocco is the clearest case. In the Rif the traditional kif plant was largely replaced from the early 2000s by hybrids such as khardala, which researchers credited with three to five times the resin. The old population was given a new name, beldiya: “local”.

Beldiya under licence

When Morocco legalised growing for medicine and industry in 2021, the first legal crops were grown from imported seed. From the beginning of 2024 the regulator also authorised beldiya, under a protocol with the food safety office and after first results of a study characterising the local variety. By August 2024 it had given 106 cooperatives, with 1,816 farmers, permission to grow it on 1,916 hectares: a landrace brought back as a licensed crop.

Landrace.wiki itself, published under an open licence, is an attempt to keep a record before more is lost. In October 2026 its map showed 727 accessions across 15 growing regions, more than a quarter of them rated a critical or high priority for conservation.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}