GUAEANTEES IN THE TRADE IN SEED 95 



produced from stock seed which he has bought, and if it turns 

 out that the seed he sold is not genuine, and is either not of 

 the strain stated or has degenerated because produced from 

 ordinary trade seed, he can get compensation from the man 

 who sold him as stock seed that which was not stock seed. 



By the year 1916 about half the acreage under root was 

 sown with seed bought with a guarantee for genuineness, that 

 is to say, seed of Class I. strains certified as such by the directors 

 of the Experimental Stations under the scheme of the Com- 

 parative Cultivations. The majority of the wholesale houses 

 gradually carried the reform through to its logical conclusion, 

 and now deal in no seed for which they cannot give a guarantee, 

 and so sell all their seed under seal and with a full guarantee, 

 that is, as explained, guaranteeing the crop to be of the strain 

 stated and yielding as the strain would and should. 



In his report on the trade in root seed in the year 1913 l 

 Helweg mentioned some cases of sale of inferior seed sold as 

 Class I. seed. Since then there have been no such cases. The 

 risk has proved too great. Cases there have been and will 

 probably always occur of errors made in filling orders. For 

 such the dealers will pay compensation. In his report on the 

 trade in 1917, after stating that no bad root seed has been sold 

 in Denmark since 1913, Helweg says : " We have come to 

 this state, that no seed merchant dare sell bad root seed in 

 Denmark. . . . Some among the old seed merchants con- 

 sidered it an interference in the free trade in seed that farmers 

 should be compensated if the seed was not what it was repre- 

 sented to be. But it did not last long before respectable seed 

 merchants understood, that a better weapon in the competition 

 with the unreliable trade [than the Laws above referred to] 

 could hardly be imagined." 2 Frequent expressions by seed 

 merchants at meetings and in the Press confirm this. The sale 

 of seed under seal with full guarantee of genuineness is a reform 

 fatal to all unreliable trade. 



The success of the latter reform, introduced in 1906 by the 

 F. D. B. and commonly adopted by the Society of Wholesale 



1 Tidsslcrifl for Planteavl, 21 vol. 



2 L. Helweg, " Report on Harvest of and Trade in Root Seed, 1917-18," 

 Tidsskrift for Planteavl, 25 vol., 1918, p. 558. 



