THE BREEDING OF PLANTS The larger part of plant-breeding work is now centralizing about the experiment stations and the Department of Agriculture. This is characteristic of our time, for the institutions hold the leadership. In time, when agricultural affairs have readjusted themselves, leadership will again lie in good part in men engaged in commercial farming. There is every reason for supposing that plant-breeding should be a personal enterprise as well as an institutional enterprise.
These remarks do not lose sight of the fact that there are a few personal and isolated plant breeders, standing out strongly and doing their work by methods of their own. In this class, Luther Burbank is preeminent. Burbank's work has been misjudged and sensationalized by reporters (a danger which just now threatens all work of this kind), until the public is in great error in its estimate of it. Mr. Burbank is experimenting with an unusual variety of plants in great numbers and under propitious natural conditions, with strongly personal methods and points of view. His place abounds in surprising and interesting results in the variation of plants. Some of the results will no doubt be of marked economic value. But his work is not occult. nor is it revolutionary. It will rank among the great efforts in the amelioration and adaptation of plants. It is calling attention to the fact that the intellectual interest in variation may be quite as much worth while as interest in the zesthetic or other companion ship with plants.
The reader will now want a statement of what plant-breeding is: it is the producing of plants that are adapted to specific conditions or requirements. The mere production of something new, or unlike anything then existing, may have little merit or purpose, and it is not plant-breeding in the best sense. It will be seen, therefore, that the first step in plant-breeding is a definite purpose or ideal ; one does not develop this ideal until he has a clear conception of his business.
The professional plant-breeders may be the persons to produce the larger and bolder races or groups ; but it must lie with the individual farmer to adapt these things to his own place, or to be able to choose those that are already adapted, as it is also his part to determine what kinds of fertilizers he shall use or what kinds of crops he shall grow. Good farmers have always been plant-breeders : they
have "selected the best" fur seed ; they have changed seed from place to place ; they have exercised a shrewd discrimination in varieties and strains. The present phase of plant-breeding differs in attach ing more importance to plant adaptations and in a better understanding of the principles underlying the practices. The good stockman does not use common stock for breeders ; the good plantsman does not use common stock for breeders.
Every good farmer, then, is of necessity a plant-breeder. He knows the points and merits of his wheat or cotton, as the dog-fancier knows the points of his dogs. Knowing this, he will also know what improvements are needed to adapt the plants to his soil or climate or system of farming or markets. He will then set about it to secure these improvements by (1) looking for plants that most nearly approach the ideal or causing them to vary toward that ideal, (2) selecting seed from these plants, (3) repeating the process as long as he lives. The remainder of the work is detail.
This process may not produce any very striking or permanent new vegetable forms ; but the efficiency of a personal business lies mostly in these smaller grades of differences. If a man is a seller of new plants, he may want plants with new names. For certain regions and certain purposes, also, wholly new kinds of things may be needed ; but with the producing of these the individual farmer will not often concern himself. It is significant that some of the most important seed business of the present day rests on the sale of improved, selected or pedigreed seed of standard varieties. Every ambitious, careful and clear-headed farmer should now be able to produce superior seed-stock of his staple crop to sell for planting at good living prices. The public is now ready to believe that there are grades of quality in seed-stock of the common crops as there is in butter or cheese or liquors (some time we will also know that there are grades of quality in plain drinking-water).