44 Breeding Plants and Animals. 



twenty acres of wheat should go through his field and 

 pick cut a sufficient number of the best spikes to make, 

 when shelled out, a half bushel of wheat. The second 

 year this seed should be carefully graded so as to se- 

 cure the heaviest large kernels and sown as a stock seed 

 plot on the best part of the wheat field. This crop 

 should be saved for seeding the entire field the third 

 year so that improved seed may be grown for sale the 

 fourth spring. This should be sold under a number as 

 Jones' Fife No. 3, assuming that Jones has already on 

 his farm two wheats. Tones' No. T (Fife) and Jones' 

 No. 2 (Blue Stem) introduced from other farms or 

 perchance from a seed firm or from an experiment 

 station. 



It has been found a good rule to give to every stock 

 of grain which has been improved a new number or in 

 some other way to distinguish it so that farmers will 

 keep track of that identical blood. This is especially im- 

 portant if the yield is known to be good and in case the 

 seed is lost the same stock, subvarietv or variety, as the 

 case may be, can be again secured from the originator 

 or from some one else who has kept it pure and true to 

 name. The crops grown for seed should be planted on 

 fields free from those weeds the seeds of which cannot 

 be completely cleaned out of the seed wheat; the seed 

 wheat should follow a crop which leaves the soil well 

 prepared for that grain. The seed grower needs to be 

 a live-stock grower so as to keep his lands fertile and 

 so that his fields may be under a system of rotation 

 which will keep the land free from weeds and in heart 

 for crops of plump, strong, fine-looking seeds. Not 

 wheat farmers, but stockmen, are the best men to grow 

 seeds. Live-stock on the farm and crops fed out to live- 

 stock are necessary for growing grain for market on 

 part of the fields of a farm ; and for growing seeds to 

 sell for planting; stock and manure-making crops are 

 doubly necessary. 



The fields of seed grown for sale should be har- 

 vested at once when fully* ripe and the grain should be 



