95 



of 1888 upon the best land to be louna in the neighborhood of Qued- 

 linbnrg". The drilling- was purposely heavy and the date of jdant- 

 in^- late in order to secure large crops of very small beets, known as 

 sticldiiKje. In the spring of 1889 the siicldinge were planted on the 

 Dipi>e farm, and the seed obtained that fall came upon the market in 

 1890. A commercial supply of pedigreed seed thus requires not less 

 than four years for its production. 



Other seedsmen had methods which they believed to be quite as reli- 

 able as that just described, and other varieties of beets, too, had good 

 reputations; hence a demand arose in 1880 for a series of competitive 

 trials to furuish official information to sugar far^ners. 



Comparative tests of varieties. — Go-operative experiments under direc- 

 tion of the Halle Station. — After a few years of [)reliminary work all seeds- 

 men who saw fit to take part in competitive trials were invited to meet 

 the director of the station at Halle and assist him in arranging the plan 

 and conditions of the tests. The expenses of the work were shared by 

 the parties interested. For the year 1888 they amounted to more than 

 $1,500. 



It was agreed that each seedsman should open his store-houses to the 

 station's officers and indicate the particular stock which he wished to 

 place in competition. The oiiicer was to decide whether the stock of seed 

 was large enough to give the test a practical and commercial standing. 

 The supplies of seed thus secured were to be distributed by lot among 

 farmers selected by Professor Maercker to make experimental tests. The 

 seeds were to be known to the experimenters by numbers only. At the 

 time of the harvest all merchantable beets of each test were to be 

 counted and weighed in the presence of a station officer, and one beet 

 out ot every hundred obtained from each test was to be put into a sam- 

 ple pile. This insured large samples, in every case exceeding two hun- 

 dred beets. The samples were to be packed, sealed, and expressed to 

 the station for analysis. 



In 1888 twenty-eight different farmers, representing as many different 

 sections of the Province of Saxony, took part in this experiment. 

 Twenty-five different lots of seed were put under trial ; these were drawn 

 from stocks descended principally from the two varieties, French and 

 German, already mentioned. Crosses of the varieties and seed from other 

 stocks made up a small part only of the total number. Three of the 

 farmers had facilities for testing, side by side, all of the twenty-five va- 

 rieties, but upon each of the other farms approximately twelve different 

 varieties only were seeded. Every variety was submitted to at least 

 eleven different experimenters. In other words, each variety of beet 

 entered by the seedsmen for the competition was tested on from eleven 

 to twenty farms, and samples of the product of each variety grown on 

 each farm weie analyzed by the station. 



Arranging the station's records of results for the year 1888 according 

 to the standard of value accepted at that time, the variety which stood 



