DAIRY AND SEED IMPROVEMENT MEETINGS. 2/7 



ment on foot in New York, as you men know, to take away 

 your seed business. Three or four counties in northern New- 

 York have Farm Bureau agents who are attempting to get the 

 seed potato business of Long Island, in particular, and there 

 are hundreds of farmers in northern New York who are prac- 

 ticing this method of seed selection and they are really getting 

 very remarkable results. I have been over their fields and their 

 records, and I was surprised at their results ; they are advertis- 

 ing extensively with the result that they are doing a very large 

 business. 



You are of course familiar with the potato train that was 

 run in Vermont a short time ago, where this system of breed- 

 ing was preached. It happens that several of the Farm Bureau 

 agents in Vermont are my students and this is what they are 

 after; first, a higher yield of potatoes and, second, a more 

 uniform strain. 



Now, of course, what I have said applies to any crop. If 

 you are breeding sweet corn so as to get a higher percentage of 

 sugar, or a more uniform strain, or an earlier strain, this ap- 

 plies equally well to these. If you are attempting to get a 

 strain of flint corn with two ears on a stalk or with the ears 

 lower down, or if you are trying for a high yielding strain of 

 oats — as the Experiment Station in this state has been doing — 

 you will practice these fundamental methods. 



Selection — individual selection — has been carried on at the 

 New York Experiment Station in the breeding of timothy hay. 

 This experiment was begun ten or twelve years ago and this 

 is what was done : They said, "This is an experiinent which 

 we are going to lay out for a series of years ; if we are going 

 to reach the ultimate goal, we will get the best material we now 

 have, and go on from that point." Timothy seed was gathered 

 from all over the world, from every state in the Union where 

 it is grown and from foreign countries. They had sixteen 

 thousand plants, so to have a wealth of material with which to 

 work. These plants were placed in the ground so that each 

 one was entirely separate, in order to give ample chance to study 

 the individual plants. They were planted thirty inches apart 

 each way, in order to find out what a timothy plant looks like, 

 so that questions like these might be answered : Does it die out 

 the first year, or the third, or does it live thirty years? What 



