276 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



the field by hand and save for seed all of the hills which have 

 six or more tubers in the hill ; perhaps, in Maine, I ought to 

 put that eight or ten, you can judge for yourselves. If your 

 yield is particularly good, we will say eight good tubers to the 

 hill. You want to make the standard high, so that only a few 

 hills will come up to it. We will save, say, the hills with 

 eight good tubers ; we won't attempt to keep them separate at 

 all. We will plant again the next year in the same way and 

 will again save the hills that have eight good tubers. Now, by 

 doing this year after year, even for a relatively short time, 

 you have eliminated the poor strains. 



A man in Michigan, who began with an ordinary strain of 

 potatoes, used as his criterion six good tubers to the hill. The 

 first year, eight per cent of his hills had this number; he saved 

 those for seed. He did the same thing for five years and, at 

 the end of that time, he had increased his percentage from 

 eight to seventy-one. Now, I think one thing that happened 

 was, that he became so interested in the breeding work that he 

 probably gave the crop better care than he would have other- 

 wise. Most of the increase was due to the elimination of the 

 poor strains. Another man whom I know did the same thing; 

 he found eight per cent the first year ; this increased to twenty- 

 one per cent the second year, and the third year there were 

 forty-seven per cent having six good tubers to the hill, and 

 this was done by a method that is relatively simple. The only 

 thing you have to do is to dig a part of your field by hand ; 

 it takes considerable time, but if the plan is uniformly carried 

 out you can readily see you are increasing your yield of pota- 

 toes very markedly, and you are doing it at the expenditure of 

 a minimum amount of labor and time. If this was something 

 that took a great amount of time, we would not suggest it with 

 as much earnestness as we do. I have done it for four years 

 on my farm, and I know I have increased my yield over 300 

 per cent ; at the same time, I know I have been getting my land 

 in better shape and have been giving my potatoes better care. 

 Not all is due to breeding, but I believe more than one-half is 

 due to that — breeding along this line of potato selection. 



I know something of what you men in Maine have been 

 doing, and we are going to look for a great deal more from 

 the Maine growers and Maine seed. There is a certain move- 



