BREEDING STAPLE FOOD PLANTS. 
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BREEDING STAPLE FOOD PLANTS. 
By Witter M. Hays, Professor of Agriculture in the University of 
Minnesota, U.S.A. 
Tue vast influence exerted by man in distributing and in improving 
the important grain, forage, root, vegetable, and fruit crops which sustain 
man and the domestic animals is rarely dwelt upon, and is really but 
partially comprehended. 
The distribution of these economic plants is by no means complete, 
and there are doubtless many useful varieties suited to the conditions 
of numerous localities into which they have not as yet been successfully 
introduced. Modern improvements in facilities of transport, the greater 
avidity of growers for useful new things, the more systematic efforts of 
seedsmen and nurserymen, and the organised efforts of scientific societies, 
experiment stations, and departments of agriculture, are all aiding in the 
rapid adjustment of species and varieties to the localities to which they are 
suited. 
The improvement of varieties, likewise, is going on at a more rapid 
rate than ever before, both through chance discoveries and as the result of 
systematic effort. Many forms have been brought together which cross 
in nature, thus resulting in a greater variety of new forms, some of which, 
happening to be of superior merit, are propagated. Year by year the 
increasing number of trained horticulturists and farmers develop a 
keener sense of discerning new and useful accidental forms, which they 
preserve and propagate, and they yearly make more clearly defined demands 
upon the seedsmen and nurserymen for plants to fit special conditions. 
Seed and nursery firms are on the alert to purchase useful varieties from 
amateurs who produce them, or from persons who make chance discoveries. 
These firms have entered upon the production of a few of the food 
plants in a rigidly systematic manner, but they have turned their atten- 
tion to the flowers more than tothe food-producing species. Sugar-Beet 
breeding is the most prominent object-lesson we have in breeding either 
plants or animals. The results here should inspire the world with a faith 
that all useful plants and animals may be scientifically bred so as to add 
very greatly to the world’s wealth. The goal is so great, if the results in 
Sugar-Beets may be taken as a standard for possible achievements, that 
the money and time required are but a drop in the bucket in comparison. 
A dozen of laboratories on Sugar-Beet seed-farms in Europe make riches 
for the seed growers and dealers, a very profitable business for many 
sugar factories, good prices for growers of Sugar-Beets, and far cheaper 
prices for the people of the entire world for their sugar. The principles 
of practice in the scientific breeding of Sugar-Beets are comparatively few 
and easily understood, and it seems quite strange that they should not 
have been heretofore generally applied to the breeding of grain, forage, 
and fruit crops. One does not need to be a prophet to see in the hand- 
writing upon the wall, that science is soon"to make in plant breeding, and 
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