220 The Sugar-Beet in America 
Kleinwanzlebener, Excelsior, Imperial, Simon-Legrand, 
Florimond, Bultean-Desprez Richest, Schrieber, Heine, 
Brabant Demesmal, Electoral Elite, Imperator. The 
two first-named varieties are most widely known in this 
country. 
If America is to establish a permanent sugar-beet-seed 
industry, one of the first steps will be the production of 
strains of beets suited to the needs of the country. With- 
out doubt, some of the better European strains will fur- 
nish the basis for selection. In any event the work should 
be seriously undertaken and continued as long as necessary. 
This will require many years of careful work, but the re- 
turns probably will justify all the work that is done. 
SINGLE-GERM SEED 
The fact that the seed-ball contains several germs, 
each of which may produce a beet plant, makes the work 
of thinning laborious. Even though the seeds are scat- 
tered at intervals in the row, the young plants are found 
in such clusters that the extra plants can be removed 
successfully only by hand. This means that the number 
of acres of beets a farmer can raise is usually limited by 
the amount of help he can secure at thinning time. It 
also means that the expense of thinning is high. 
These conditions led the United States Department of 
Agriculture, in the early days of the beet-sugar industry, 
to conduct rather extensive experiments on the breeding 
of strains of beets producing seed-balls that contained 
but one germ. Though some progress was made, the 
results were not altogether satisfactory and the work was 
