8 SOY BEAN VARIETIES. 



Introduction of tlie United States Department of Agriculture has 

 secured from seven different countries of the old world no less than 

 65 different lots of soy bean seeds, representing about twenty varieties. 



Other experiment stations and some seedsmen and private investi- 

 gators have also been at w^ork on this crop, and the number of real 

 or supposed varieties has increased very rapidly in this country dur- 

 ing the past few years. This general introduction of a new and little- 

 known crop naturally resulted in much confusion concerning the 

 names and characters of the different varieties. In many cases disap- 

 pointment and loss have been caused to the grower by the lack of 

 this information, and a really valuable crop has been brought into 

 disfavor in some localities. 



It is the purpose of this paper to describe and classify all obtainable 

 varieties in such a way as to make them and their adaptations recog- 

 nizable to farmers, seedsmen, and agricultural experimenters. 



VARIABILITY. 



The varieties described in the following pages are, of course, not 

 botanical varieties, but agricultural forms, differing in color and size 

 of seeds, in height and habit of plant, and in earliness and lateness 

 of maturing. All these characters, except the color of the seed, vary 

 greatly with the climate and soil. The variation between the prod- 

 ucts of two different years at the same place is frequently very strik- 

 ing. Every agricultural worker is familiar with the phenomena 

 resulting from sowing southern-grown seed of various crops in the 

 North, and vice versa. In the case of the soy bean, observation 

 shows that the plant reaches a state of equilibrium usually in the 

 second generation, and almost certainly in the third generation. 



In the case of imported seeds, where the habit of the parent plant 

 and the conditions under which it grew are generally unknown, it is 

 naturally difficult to tell when equilibrium has been reached. It is 

 certain that mam^ of these imported forms are much smaller in size 

 and of earlier maturity the first year in this country than they are 

 the second year. Some have been discarded at experiment stations 

 after one year of trial as "too dwarf to have any value here," when 

 subsequent trial has shown them to be decidedly large and prolific. 

 Some have not shown their true value until the third year, and per- 

 haps not wholly even then. In some of these importations the varia- 

 tion year by year has been so striking as to arouse a suspicion that 

 the plants are not the same as those of the preceding crop. Such, 

 for example, is Agrostology No. 1299 (see Hollybrook) , a yellow soy 

 received from France and first grown in 1902. In that year it reached 

 a height of 12 to 16 inches and ripened in ninety-five days, being 

 classed as a " dwarf early yellow." In 1903 it reached 24 to 28 inches 



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