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effort in all directions. Orders were issued compelling farmers to plough grassland and to 

 grow such crops as the local committees decided were best, the prices of fertilisers were 

 fixed, men uniitted for the fighting line were organized in agricultural battalions, a women's 

 Land Army was recruited, and fanning generally was controlled in the national interest. 



I soon found that an adequate supply of seed was matter for anxiety and measures 

 were taken to secure it. My scientific colleagues however, were no less anxious to ensure 

 that in a time of such stress farmers should be furnished only with pure seed of proper 

 germination and two steps were accordingly taken. An Official Seed Testing Station for 

 England and Wales was opened under the direction of Mr. Stapledon, since appointed 

 Professor of Agricultural Botany at the University College of Wales, and a Testing of 

 Seeds Order was issued under War Emergency Powers. Both the new Station and the 

 Order date from November Wth 1917, but the Order did not begin , to operate until 

 January 1st 1918. The broad idea of this first Order was not to fix standards of germi- 

 nation and pui'ity, but to compel the seed merchants to declare the percentages of the seeds 

 they sold and leave the farmer to satisfy himself that the percentages were satisfactory. 



The experience of the working of the Order during the first five months of 1917 led 

 to a revised Order being put into force on 1st July 1918, in which standard germinations 

 were sheduled for cereals, peas, beans, and the mqst important vegetables. This Order 

 applied to Scotland and Ireland as well as to England and Wales, and the results of 

 control were found to be so eminently beneficial to our agriculture that in 1920 its 

 general provisions were incorporated in a Real-Bill applying to England, Wales and 

 Scotland, which became law on August l^^ 1920 but will not come into operation until 

 August 1st 1921, until which date the Emergency Testing of Seeds Order will remain in 

 force. Owing to political changes in Ireland, that part of the United Kingdom has not 

 adopted the new Act, but continues to administer their Act of 1909, but all sales of Irish 

 seed to England and Scotland are governed by the new Act of 1920. The new Act of 

 Parliament is an exceedingly flexible instrument and has some novel features. It empowers 

 the Agricultural Departments (a) to prescribe the particulars which a seller of seeds must 

 deliver to the buyer of them; (b) to compel sellers to test seeds which are for sale either 

 at one of the three Official Seed Testing Stations (in England, Scotland and Ireland) or 

 at a private Station licensed by the Government; (c) to forbid altogether the sale of seeds 

 which contain more than a prescribed percentage of certain injurious weeds. 



All details as to the sorts of seeds to be controlled in these ways are the subject 

 of Regulations issued by the Departments of Agriculture which can be altered and extended 

 from time to time, but it is provided that all interests concerned shall be consulted by 

 the Departments. This brings me to one of the most interesting features in the new 

 system of seed control which we have established. 



When in 1917 I began to take steps in this direction the Department set up two 

 Advisory Committees, one on Cereal Seeds and the other on all other Agricultural Seeds, 

 on which sat representatives of the three Departments and of all sections of the Seed 

 Trade. To these Committees were remitted all the Government's proposals as to control 

 and it is to their patriotic and large minded deliberations that we owe a system of control 

 that is at once valuable to agriculture and workable in practice. I should like to add 

 that when, as has been inevitable, restrictions and regulations were under discussion which 

 threw burdens upon the trade involving additional work in all branches of their undertakings 

 and often rendering unsaleable seed of mediocre quality which would readily have been 

 sold if no control existed, the public spirit of our trade advisers was never on the side of 

 undue relaxation of the control proposed. I am satisfied that it would have been impossible 

 in an individualistic countiy like Great Britain, to have imposed upon the trade a system 

 which is more far reaching than any in force in the world, if we had not convinced them 

 by free argument at innumerable meetings that a strict measure of control will be in the 

 long' run an advantage rather than a hindrance to well organized and honourably conducted 

 business undertaking^. 



