82 Breeding Plants and Animals. 



plants, 12x12 inches apart, in the breeding nursery and 

 twenty newly-bred sorts in field plots, where the final 

 selection is to be made before disseminating the one or 

 few best kinds. 



Of sugar and stock beets there were many thousands 

 of plants, of which 1,500 were mother plants, the 

 mother roots of which had been siloed or pitted. They 

 were planted late and owing in part to the very cold 

 wet season only a partial crop of seed was secured. 

 It has been proved by trials for three winters, how- 

 ever, that the mother beets may be successfully kept 

 over winter in pits in this climate. 



Corn was represented 1 by about 20,000 plants in 

 nursery rows, planted 42x18 inches apart. One variety, 

 Minn. No. 13, has been distributed for several years 

 by the station and hundreds of thousands of acres of it 

 are now annually grown throughout the state, both in 

 hills for ears and thickly in drills for dry fodder and 

 for silage. It has been adopted by the South Dakota 

 station as the best to distribute to the South Dakota 

 farmers. Like some trotting horses this variety "per- 

 forms better than it looks." In the breeding of this 

 variety much more attention has been given to increas- 

 ing the yield in the north zone of the corn-belt by statis- 

 tical methods than to securing uniformity or to making 

 it appear attractive. While most corn breeders are 

 going far to the other extreme I am convinced that we 

 could well have paid much more attention to appear- 

 ance. 



"We have stood up so straight that we have leaned 

 backward" in breeding almost wholly for earliness and 

 yield. 



During the past two seasons the wet cold weather 

 and heavy autumnal frosts caught many varieties in 

 sections where this variety succeeded. We have lat- 

 terly bred this variety for greater uniformity and it is 

 responding to selection for looks as it did earlier to 

 selection for earliness and larger yield. The experi- 

 ments with this corn show that looks must not be ig- 



