814 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



This seed is sold to the seedsman, who in the course of his bus- 

 iness sells to the farmer or gardener a sufficient quantity of tiiis 

 mixed stuff, which he calls turnip blood beet, to seed an acre, 

 whicli crop he intends to sell in the market. He gives such 

 cultivation as would ordinarily make a good crop. When he has 

 done all this, and his crop is grown and secured, he finds, much 

 to his loss, that he has a lot of mongrel stuff which is unfit for 

 market purposes ; and that, instead of being worth seventy-five 

 cents a bushel for market purposes, it is only worth fifteen cents 

 a bushel for cattle feeding. 



Now, five hundred bushels is not a large crop of turnip beets 

 to be grown on an acre. The difference in value at these prices 

 would be three hundred dollars. One would not pay the cost of 

 growing, while the other would pay well. The farmer then 

 goes to the dealer and finds fault with him for selling bad seed. 

 The seedsman will say that he bought it for good seed, but buy- 

 ing of more than one grower, probably could not tell who pro- 

 duced such poor stuff. 



Now, who has to suffer for this bad seed ? Why, the farmer 

 of course ; he is the one who has to stand all sorts of annoy- 

 ances — bad seed, insufficient market accommodations, combina- 

 tions of middle-men to get his rightful profits ; and who, after 

 giving all the care and expense necessary to produce a good 

 crop, from his acre gets only seventy-five instead of three him- 

 dred and seventy-five dollars, simply from sowing bad seed. 



This is not an overdrawn picture, and, as far as the growing 

 of the seed is concerned, we have known precisely this thing. 

 We have also known a seedsman to purchase a large quantity of 

 marrow squashes on the field, in the vicinity of Boston, for the 

 purpose of getting the seeds. This man did not take the pre- 

 caution to see if other varieties of squashes were growing in the 

 immediate vicinity, near enough to mix and spoil the whole. If 

 he had he would have found on the other side of the fence dif- 

 ferent varieties growing in large quantities, which had surely 

 mixed with and spoiled all the seed he had bought. 



There can be no sufficient excuse for such gross carelessness, 

 and the person who commits it is just as much to blame as if it 

 was done with the deliberate intent to defraud and cheat his 

 customers, and the injury done to the purchaser is precisely the 



