The citizen-Republican. (Scotland, Bon Homme County, S.D.) 1???-19??, 1907-11-14
WHAT ABOUT SEED OATS?

The outlook for securing good,
strong oats for seeding next spring
Is not assuring. AS late threshing re-
turns are made known, 1T becomes
more evident tina the grain is poorly
filled, and much of 1t shrunken until
it Will not make safe seed to SOW.
With his alarming scarcity of de-
! pendabie seed, il behooves every farm
er to make early n ample pro-
vision for seed. Where heavy seed cam
not be had the next best thing to do
is to grade your home grow stock
until you are ure that you have blow
over and discarded all light n
shrunken kernels. Too much pains
cannot be taken with this seed, for
the crop has received a severe set
and most vigorous seed can now be
depended upon to help matters next
season.
There is no use trying to shield the
fact that our oat crops AVE been
deteriorating for several years. When
conditions are favorable, we succeed in
growing a fair crop: but oats have
lost that stamina which would enable
1t to pull through adverse conditions,
and the result is that wet weather or
cold weather disastrously affects the
crop. What we need is some live work
in breeding up old varieties, or intro
ducing some new blood. AS yet We
hav done practically nothing, or at
least we ave accomplished nothing.
We have not today one solitary variety
of oats which we can depend upon to
pull through a bad season. The Swe-
dish Select, which did we'll in the
northern oat belt for so many years,
notably in Wisconsin, has made very
poor showing this season. In fact, in
some of the best oat counties in Wis
%copsin, the Silver Mine and the scrub
sorts have done better thar the high
1.--l ,~I, VI
oats l have seen this season comes
from northern Minnesota. 1t is an UNI
named variety, but it has been care
fully selected for six years. and it has
been proved harder, more nearly rust
proof and a better hull than any of
the new sorts. This leads me back
again to the question of grading up
the best we lave on our own farms.
If some neighbor has been successful
in getting a fair crop. try some of his
seed, and then SOW enough to make a
COCO Stand.
One thing is certain, we must get
busy breeding up. This can be done
by two ways-by selection and by hy-
bridizipg. Selection is the most feasible
method for farmers, but it must be
persistently and Systematically.
Cleaning and grading seed grain is
as far as it goes. But for best
results hand selection should be prac-
ticed in the fields, selecting the pest
filed heads and best stalks of straw.
BY going through the field just when
the crop is turning ripe, these out
standing heads will be quite easily no.
tfced, and II car surely select enough
to SOW an acre plat the next season.
Cross breeding or hybridizing is dis
tlnctly the work of the plant breeder
and our experiment stations, n While
our oat fields show the need Of work
Of this kind. farmers had best stick
to hand selection. We are fast COM
to a point where every farmer must
be an eXperimentalist. The conditions
even adjacent farms vary so widely
only general rules can be laid
down. SO it must rest with every in
farmer to work out his own
problems, and work for results on his
w land. and under his own condi-