300 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



WELL-BRED SEED. 



of any kind, and when I speak of good seed, I mean more than simply 

 seed which will sprout and grow — I mean seed of a variety adapted 

 for growing in a certain soil and climate — I mean pure-bred seed, or 

 at least, well-bred seed of that variety, and this is hard to find. We 

 have the term "pure bred" corn ; but any of you who have grown it 

 know it is not pure bred. In my judgment, it will take a long time 

 yet to make pure bred corn, and then the breeders will always have 

 to fight to keep it pure bred. 



And this is true of other crops raised on the farm, that they are 

 all badly mixed. Take wheat, for instance. Kansas is one of the 

 great wheat producing states in the Union, and yet I find in travel- 

 ing over the state and observing the samples of grain exhibited and 

 delivered at the elevators, that we have practically no pure-bred 

 wheat. It is all mixed. I have never discovered a sample of pure- 

 bred wheat. There is some well-bred wheat, and some farmers are 

 doing careful work in grading their seed wheat and keeping their 

 seed grain as pure as possible, but there is no pure-bred seed to 

 start with. 



That is the difficulty. 



We find in the comparative tests of varieties of corn, wheat, 

 oats and other farm crops at the Kansas Experiment Station that 

 there is a great difference in the yield and in the quality of the grains 

 produced by different varieties. 



In 1904 some thirty different varieties of winter wheat were 

 grown in small plots side by side. The soil was practically the 

 same. All grain was sown on the same day, at the same rate of 

 seeding, and the crops given exactly the same culture and treatment, 

 and yet the yields of grain from those plots varied from nineteen to 

 thirty-seven bushels per acre. The experiment was repeated in 

 1905 on a little better piece of land ; perhaps, too, it was a little better 

 year for wheat. The yields varied from thirty-one to forty-seven 

 and a half bushels per acre, and the difference in the grade and qual- 

 ity of the grain was as great as the difference in the yield. Some 

 of the inferior producing varieties were discarded and the test re- 

 peated again in 1906, the resulting yields ranging from thirty-nine 

 to fifty-one bushels per acre. A few of these varieties have proven 

 superior to others and much better adapted for growing in our soil 

 and climate. I will name several of these: Kharkof, Malakoff, 

 Red Turkey, Bearded Fife, Red Winter, Defiance, the Zimmerman 

 and Fultz. 



