We grow almost all our own food here, and have done for about ten years, and I have also recently started selling seeds as well.
We have one major problem in the garden: Vege bugs (aka green sheild bug, stink bug). These suck the devoloping fruit on virtually anything … tomatoes, beans, peas, corn, linseed, even some nuts when young. The problem is, they don’t affect the plant at all, in fact they only show up once the crop starts, and then they hit everything equally … sickly plants get hit a bit worse, but the really healthy plants get hit just as bad as the mediocre ones.
Probably most notable is the linseed, this gets completely covered in vege bugs as it reaches maturity, and in a bad year gets hit so hard there is hardly anything left by the time its ripe. There is no appreciable difference in the degree of damage in different plants, there are just so many vege bugs they get the lot, and in order to try and find whether some plants are hit worse than others, you have to go through and open individual seed capsules after the crop is harvested. A marathon task to say the least.
Tomatoes its easier, in them you can see which fruit have been affected worse, but since each plant has both fruit that have been hit really hard and fruit that are hardly touched, its very hard to find any increased resistance in any of them.
How would one go about breeding for horizontal resistance to something like this??