A I would think that you would have to be a master grower to become a breeder.
I'd say that on paper it isn't absolutely necessary; if you have the genetics knowledge and/or a lot of experience breeding plants in general, you wouldn't necessarily have to have a lot of experience actually cultivating cannabis in particular to be a good breeder. In fact, you could effectively "subcontract" out the actual growing part to growers you hire/work with, while you just planned out the overall breeding strategy and did the selections. So YOU wouldn't have to be a great grower to be a breeder, though you'd at least have to be working with one!
In most breeding projects, it is absolutely critical to have the ability to do good selections, and a certain amount of experience is necessary before you can do that.
In practice, even though you wouldn't necessarily "need" to be a master grower to be a good breeder, most of the top notch breeders are also themselves master growers. Even there, the bigger "name" breeders typically work with teams of growers to get the day to day "grunt" work of maintaining plants, taking clones, harvesting seeds, etc, done.
Most people here on RIU try to act like they are breeders, but I can tell just by the way they talk on here that they aren't.
Well, I'm sure as hell NOT a breeder, don't claim nor pretend to be one.
While I think the idea of creating new strains has some appeal to any cannabis "fan", unlike some of the chatterers here, I know what it actually takes to do it, and, no thank you. . .I don't have the time, space, or inclination to mess with hundreds of plants over many generations to actually do this correctly. I'm happy to pay the real breeders to do the work for me, instead of trying to re-invent the wheel myself.
Furthermore, if you look at what's already out there, there are dozens if not dozens of dozens of excellent strains already on the market. There is precious little I'd say "needs" to exist that doesn't already. Off the top of my head, I can think of 1-2 projects to create potentially useful "niche" plants, that to the best of my knowledge don't already exist, but its not clear to me that these would be financially viable, let alone anything I would want to spend years of my life doing.
As far as crossing a strain anyone can do that without much trouble. All you need is some male pollen and a female in flower, and there you go. You got yourself a cross. I don't care for such crosses because I think you will get so much variation in your phenos.
This depends on exactly what you are crossing. Cross hybrids, and you can end up with quite a variety of phenotypes.
On the other hand, if you're just doing a simple cross of two inbred lines, the resulting seeds you get shouldn't show much variation in phenotypes. But just about any of the "obvious" of these F1 crosses using established inbred lines have been done already, and in fact, many of them are even commercially available (eg NL#5 x everything, Big Bud x everything, White Widow x everything, Skunk #1 x everything, etc).
So while you could do these yourself, if you wanted to (ie just to see what they look like or to save money buying similar seeds), this isn't really "breeding".
