(3) Growing and breeding seed crops for home use.
It has been clearly demonstrated that it is pos sible to increase the product per acre of the average farm up to 40 per cent simply by the use of im proved strains of seed developed on the farm itself, at the cost of a little well-directed effort on the part of the farmer. There is no more effective way of increasing the money profit of the farm and the attractiveness of farming as an occupation, particularly to alert -minded young men, than through wise efforts in the improvement of the quality of the seed to be used.
A most important factor controlling the profit of any crop is uniformity in the plants. With most crops, the profit would be greatly increased if each plant were only equal in quantity and quality of yield to that of the best one-third of them. Superlative individuals rarely add to the value of a crop, while markedly inferior ones always detract from it.
The character and potentiality of every plant grown directly from seed seems to be fixed and inherent in the seed itself, and is made up of a balanced sum of potentialities and limitations inherited in different degrees from each of its ancestors for an indefinite number of generations. There is a difference in the degree to which plants have the power of transmitting their individual characteristics to their descendants, or in their prepotency, and we can he sure as to the potential character of the seed only in proportion as we know the character and prepotent power of its ancestors. It may not be possible to know this fully, but we can accomplish much by a wise sys tem of plant selection and breeding. A somewhat full discussion of this subject is given in Chapter III and under a number of the individual crops, so that it is necessary here to give only a few general directions. Study your plant and settle on the exact type which would be most practically desira ble, and write out as full and complete description of its characteristics as possible. With the descrip tion in hand, select one to ten or more plants, which most fully accord with it, avoiding those of phenomenal excellence in some particulars at the cost of deficiencies in others. Save the seed of
each selected plant separately, even if the plants themselves cannot be distinguished from each other, and plant that of each selected individual by itself, though all may be side by side in a single block. When the plants mature, go over the different lots, that is, the plants grown from the seed of each of the selected individual plants, and reject those lots in which the plants show the greatest varia tions, even if in so doing you reject a few plants of superlative merit. Select the two or three lots in which the plants most uniformly accord with the description, and from these lots select plants to repeat the process. The object is to secure a fixed type of plants that are uniformly of the desired type, rather than superlative individual plants. The remainder o f the seed from the best lots can be used for a general crop. The essen tials for success in seed - breed ing are (1) a clear concep tion of the ex act type of plant wanted ; (2) a carefully written out de scription of that type and very rigid ad herence to it in all selec tions; (3) saving and planting separately the seed of each selected plant ; (4) continuing to select from generation to generation from the product of the selected plants those that are most uniformly of the desired type. In some cases, where such crops as garden peas, beans or sweet corn, which have some feeding value, have been grown, farmers often come into possession of seed that has been rejected by seedsmen as unfit for their use, and plant it as a field crop, making no effort to have the seed pure and unmixed. Such stock speedily degenerates and can be sold only at a reduced price or when the regular supply has failed. Quite a proportion of the tomato seed used in this country comes from canning factories, being washed out from the waste of the tables where the fruit is prepared for canning, or from lots of fruit that is over-ripe, or that used for catsup. If saved from equally good fruit, such seed is as good as that from fields grown especially for seed, but usually it comes from a mixture of fruit of different sorts and qualities and is of very poor quality.