6 SUGAR-BEET SEED 



and, to maintain the purity of the blood, it is con- 

 stantly interbred with new standard varieties. 



The work is infinite and must be continued year after 

 year, generation after generation, and century after 

 century, so long as beets continue to be grown for 

 their sugar product. 



Beets resemble the human species, in that the best 

 results are to be obtained neither by breeding too 

 closely as with the marriage of cousins, nor by inter- 

 mingling races. Knauer maintained that all existing 

 varieties of sugar beets came from one of five starting 

 points: ist, Belgian; 2d, Quedlinburg; 3d, Silesian; 

 4th, Siberian; 5th, Imperial beet. 



The problem in beet-seed culture is to breed a seed 

 which will produce beets that not only will be satis- 

 factory in sugar content and tonnage, but which will 

 give like or better results from year to year. In the 

 early stages of the work, this quality was lacking; 

 sugar factories could not depend upon either tonnage 

 or sugar content. 



European beets have been tested running 20 and 

 even 22 per cent, sugar, but experiments in breeding 

 made with these very high testing beets have resulted 

 in comparatively inferior roots. Inasmuch as when the 

 approximate state of perfection has been reached in 



