8 



guard against a financial emergency; but I believe also that 

 the farmer who does not make a little deposit of excess fertility 

 in his soil each year, upon which he may draw when the crop- 

 ping emergency comes, is not in the way of making the greatest 

 possible success as a farmer, I have known farmers to whom 

 it was a sort of a religion to deal justly with their soil — to 

 make it better each year. These men seldom fail to produce 

 a crop. 



Good Seed. 



The farmer who is looking to eliminate risks will pay most 

 careful attention to his seed supply. The seed carries in embryo 

 the possibilities of reproducing the parent plant. It may or 

 may not have great productive capacity and great vitality 

 which will enable it to survive adverse conditions; and it may 

 be free from diseases which will jeopardize the crop, or it may 

 be a carrier of these diseases. 



In 1863 it took 18 pounds of beets to make a pound of sugar; 

 in 1904 less than 7 pounds of beets yielded a pound of sugar. 

 This improvement was brought about by testing the sugar 

 content of individual beets and saving for seed production those 

 which produced the most. 



An experiment station has conducted a seven-year test of 

 the difference in productivity of small and large plump grain 

 seed. The results show an average increase of 15,4 bushels of 

 oats, 7,8 bushels of barley, 5 bushels of wheat, and 5.1 bushels 

 of peas from the large seed over the small. 



I have seen no better illustration of the value of good seed 

 than the account, in the "New England Homestead" of Jan- 

 uary 17, of the demonstration experiments conducted by the 

 Hampden county agent on 11 farms to test the value of north- 

 ern-grown certified seed potatoes in comparison with home- 

 grown seed. The northern certified seed averaged 274 bushels 

 per acre, while the home-grown seed averaged but 131 bushels 

 per acre, or 143 bushels less. In a year of low prices this 

 difference in yield produced by good seed alone would have 

 made the difference between success and failure in the potato 

 crop of this section. No work which our experiment stations 

 have done for us has been more valuable than the breeding of 

 good strains of seeds and the determination of their produc- 

 tivity. 



