The Responsibilities of the Seedsmen

JOHN F. SCHIFFMAN AND ROBERT W. SCHERY.

THE SEED industry has a responsibility to see to it that Americans have plenty of clean, plump seeds of guaranteed purity and germination, suitable heredity, and good potentiality.

The responsibility is one for men, not boys.

The seed trade, a hybrid of agriculture and commerce, has been affected by a ferment in both. Mechanization and applied research have revolutionized production. The trend is toward greater specialization and unprecedented outlays for research and equipment. Merchandising has assumed great importance a development somewhat strange to agriculture.

An industry that long accepted low margins of profit and modest promotion now faces a need to tell consumers about an increasingly complex system.

Few industries have asked so little profit from their own progress. Years are spent to create a new variety, but the variety, after its brief moment of glory, becomes the property of everyone, without royalty.

Hybrid corn the sole "invention" of the seed industry to spawn explosive growth is the glowing example of a seed that yields enough income to assure rapid progress. New developments have not been equally rewarding financially in other sectors.

Much of the industry therefore has relied on public institutions for much basic development. The industry has always acknowledged its debt to the research programs of agricultural colleges and the Department of Agriculture and has supported them.

Because newer varieties are especially selected for expected qualities, the "origin" of seeds fades from importance as an indicator of adaptiveness. The seed trade always has assumed its responsibility for purity and germination, but realizes the need for independent checking to assure varietal reliability on creations newly developed at experiment stations.

The basic crop creations have originated mostly at State and Federal agricultural experiment stations, where time and facilities are available to tackle long breeding programs. After release, the industry tackles large-scale isolation to protect lines from outside pollination, and the even more costly hand pollination or growing under glass necessary with some crops. The seedsmen may further refine strains to meet the needs of growers and markets. Thus, scores of regional strains of Great Lakes lettuce were developed to meet growers' needs. The puny, wild-type marigold on short stems has been continuously selected and improved to yield giant hybrids in an array of colors. And so on.

Much of the seed industry is experiencing a strengthening of research within individual companies. A skilled scientific staff has become an integral component of important seed houses. It is not uncommon today for a major firm to have hundreds of varieties under trial, with thousands of trial rows for observation and evaluation. Such companies maintain several well-equipped breeding stations and experienced production men, who use modern methods and equipment and excellent facilities to provide superior seeds.

Hybrid corn has been a stimulating example to other segments of the industry should not hybrid vigor and the sale of F₁ seed be applicable to many species? The accumulation of combining and inbred lines, which yield distinctive F₁ seed, offers opportunity to build the only unique asset likely to befall a seed corporation. Such assets should enable the concerns to support further research that leads to accelerated progress.

The industry has barely begun pre wide-spread utilization of company-developed combining stocks. F₁ petunias and marigolds, tetraploid snapdragons, seedless triploid watermelons, male-sterile lines of onions, and other innovations indicate that the threshold has been crossed elsewhere, too.

The industry is also accepting responsibility toward basic research. Progressive firms have sponsored, through the American Seed Trade Association, the Seed Research Foundation, dedicated to furtherance of basic research by whatever individuals and laboratories, private or public, are most capable of carrying it out. The first projects, sponsored through grants to three colleges, deal chiefly with studies on seed germination and keeping. There is realization that without greater basic understanding of seeds, applied research will progress less efficiently.

Meanwhile, individual companies continue their research efforts, which have already yielded such spectacular improvements as disease-resistant species of the cabbage group, cotton varieties with high-quality lint, hybrids of sweet corn, better canning beets, disease-free beans, high-yielding and uniform carrots, earlier large-ear sweet corn, mosaic-resistant cucumbers, green beans and squash for the freezer, sutureless cantaloups, compact celeries, a series of hybrid snapdragons, and many of the "All-America" garden selections.

Every technique in plant breeding is used, including mass selection, single-plant selections, hybridization, the chemically induced variations, and irradiation. Breeding programs are guided by the requirements of seed users, determined from reports of salesmen and company research men, who visit the growing areas.

IT IS LESS easy to generalize about responsibilities for maintaining supplies.

That the supply of seeds has been sufficient to meet the major needs at-tests to good planning and maintenance of production. This service to the Nation and the economy has been unfaltering, bolstered by a system of branch warehousing in areas of sizable consumption. Within small, specialized markets with differing traditions and needs there may be temporary deficiencies, but even then seeds of complementary type usually are obtainable. For lawns, for example, a little more Oregon-grown red fescue can be used should Kentucky bluegrass be in short supply because of drought or vice versa, when the supply of fine fescue is lean.