CHAPTER VI.
PLANT-BREEDING.
Plant-breeding is producing plants adapted to particular conditions or requirements; but the mere production of something new or different, is not true plant-breeding. The plant breeder has a definite purpose or aim in mind, and this comes only from a clear idea of his business. The professional breeders produce the races or groups, but the intelligent individual farmer adapts them to his own conditions, and may make modifications of inestimable value to other farmers.
Good farmers have always been plant-breeders, even though they did not know it. They have always kept the best ear of corn and the best potato for seed. They have followed the stock-breeder’s plan—only the best stock for sires and dams. So no common plants should be used for seed; only the finest is worth planting. Improvement is made by selection, as Darwin taught us many years ago, but we are slow to learn new lessons. We know that we do not look to the children of physically, mentally or morally deformed persons for our specimens of physical, mental and moral manhood; nor to the cur’s litter for the best type of pup. Now we are learning that the same holds good with plants, and that the farmer who keeps the small potatoes for seed will produce poorer potatoes than he ought to have.
The other day I found a farmer harvesting a measly lot of corn. “Where did you get that seed?” I asked. “Oh,” he said, “I picked it up ’most anywhere.” I could have told him that myself without asking.
Selection and breeding are not the work of experts alone, for any one who gains the simple knowledge that enables him to recognize the plant or crop that resists prevailing diseases and flourishes best under his conditions, needs only to preserve the seed of such plants for propagating. Cross-breeding, on the contrary, is expert work, but new strains may be secured by straight selection of individual plants, and this gives enormous results. If one persistently saves the seeds of those plants that best serve his purpose, he will soon have crops that are superior to any that he had before. The process is so simple that anybody can do it. We have talked for years of the “survival of the fittest,” and this is but helping the best to beat the poorer ones.
What causes the variations that make selection possible nobody yet knows; but we do know that changes in soil, climate, methods of growing and in other things have an effect. Some variations come from “crossing,” and some from no cause that we can see: in those cases they are called “sports” of nature; learn to look out for them and when the new variety is better than anything you have before produced, save it for seed and see what comes of it. You may thereby be doing all mankind a service.