1920.] 



Forage Crops of Denmark. 



Mr. Faber's book will agree, and they were so designed that the 

 conclusions to be drawn were obvious to all ; but, as regards 

 scientific accuracy and refinement of method, they have since 

 been completely outclassed by experiments dealing with the 

 same problem carried out at Cambridge University between 

 1902 and 1909 by Wood, Berry and Middleton.* 



The Cambridge experiments confirmed conclusively the 

 results obtained from Fjord's trials, but it can only be with a 

 sense of shame that the British agriculturist contemplates the 

 contrast between the effects of these two sets of experiments 

 in their respective countries. What these were in Denmark 

 Mr. Faber describes most lucidly in his second chapter. He 

 shows us how ready the Danish farmer has always been both to 

 instigate and to profit by the results of research. Much had 

 already been done towards the improvement of farm crops by 

 selection, and the Danish Seed Testing Station (the earliest 

 extant) had already made its influence felt in the direction of 

 encouraging the use of home-grown seed. So it happened that 

 all was prepared for the widespread application of the results 

 of Fjord's work ; it only needed the man who should dis- 

 seminate the knowledge and point out the best means of 

 applying it. That man was L. Helweg, who had already 

 started supervising and reporting on root trials in 1886. Every- 

 one will follow with interest Mr. Faber's account of the suc- 

 cession of painstaking cultural experiments by which Helweg 

 obtained evidence of the superiority of home-grown seed over 

 tfiat imported from the best foreign firms, and his investigations 

 to discover which of the varieties gave the highest yield of dry 

 matter per acre under varying conditions of soil and climate 

 m Denmark. This, however, did not sufiice, for his trials had 

 proved, by that time, that there were, within the varieties 

 themselves, races or " strains " which contained larger or 

 smaller percentages of dry matter, and that these differences 

 were inherent in the races, and were transmitted through the seed 

 to their descendants. Helweg, therefore, devoted his energies 

 to the discovery of the superior races, and, having done so, 

 he published the names and addresses of the vendors of the seed. 



The farmers were not slow to use the knowledge obtained 

 for them, and to-day root seed, unless it has come from a race 

 which has been proved ist class in the comparative trials, is 

 unsaleable in Denmark. No farmer will be deluded into buying 

 seed from roots which merely look pretty and give a high total 



* Wood and Berry : Jour. Agri. Sci., Vol. I., Part 2. p. 176. Wood. 

 Ibid, Vol. nr., Part 3. p. 225. 



2 C 



