Why Ferry s 



Seed 



Tomato trials 

 at Oakview. 

 Regardless of 

 pedigree and 

 heritage, no 

 Ferry-Morse 

 seed crop goes 

 to market until 

 it has had a pur- 

 ity trial. 



Snapdragon 

 "Workshop" at 

 Salinas. Snap- 

 dragons bred to 

 resist rust are a 

 recent develop- 

 ment. 



Nowhere Else in the World is garden seed breeding 

 conducted on so large a scale as at the Ferry-Morse 

 Seed Breeding Stations! At Oakview near Rochester, 

 Michigan, eight hundred and fifty acres, and at San 

 Juan Bautista and Salinas, California, more than 

 twelve hundred acres are devoted to trials, breeding 

 work, and the growing of stock seed necessary to plant 

 the more than fifty thousand acres required annually 

 for seed production. 



Men of long experience and skill wage a never- 

 ending campaign to keep the many hundreds of vari- 

 eties true to type,' to improve them if possible, and to 

 find new and better strains. More than fifty thousand 

 germination tests and more than nine thousand trials 

 for purity are made each year. Thousands of single 

 plants, perfect of their kind or with unusual character- 

 istics, are segregated in cages or bags ; they are watched 



Above — A member of the Salinas 

 Seed Breeding staff making a lettuce 

 "cross." He is using sterilized 

 instruments to transfer pollen from a 

 selected lettuce plant to the stigma 

 of this lettuce flower. 



At the left— Onion seed being dried 



at San Juan. The seed is spread on 



huge canvas sheets and raked every 



day until thoroughly dry. 



