Plant Breeding.

Press, Volume LXII, Issue 18670, 20 April 1926, Page 6

Plant Breeding.

It is a healthy sign that the current season will see the plant breeding experiments of Lincoln College extended, by the aid of a Government grant, to the whole of the South Island. There is no doubt that the greatest advance in agriculture' during the present century has been in the improvement of agricultural plants. The experiments of Nilson in Sweden, of Burbank and Hayes in America, of Ferrar in Australia were all-started before last century closed, and would all doubtless have had some result; but the great extension of plant breeding, its systematisation and progressive successes, have all been built upon the work of Mendel, who wrote an article in an obscure journal more than sixty years ago. The rediscovery of his work and the recognition of its importance form dne of those romantic episodes in which the history of science abounds. The improvement of garden plants, and of such farm crops as are self-fertilised — wheat, oats, barley, and peas—was comparatively simple,' but it is the grasses that are the most important crops in New Zealand, and those who have seen the preliminary work of Dr. Hilgendorf on cocksfoots know that there is an enormous field for improvement in that universally used grass. We understand that Professor Stapeldon, the most active experimenter in grass improvement in the Englishspeaking world, is about to visit Lincoln, so that the Board's decision to make the grass improvement work embrace the whole Island comes at a happy time. The result of this work, if it succeeds, will of course be an appreciable increase in the carrying capacity of vast tracts of country, but it is to be hoped also that a preliminary result will be an increase in the number of farmers actively interested in the College.