Growing Vegetable Seeds for Sale

MEN WHO grow vegetable seeds for sale engage in a specialized and highly competitive farming operation. They compete to maintain superior strains of most standard varieties and to develop new varieties. Most of the large vegetable seed companies have well-qualified staffs to develop and maintain stock seed, from which is produced seed for the market, mostly by farmers who have contracts with the companies. The producers of vegetable seeds must know the cultural requirements of the vegetables they are growing throughout the life of the plants, not just until they have reached an edible stage. As a food crop, a biennial such as carrot or onion, for example, requires but one year of growth, but as a seed crop it requires two. On the choice between leaving a biennial in the ground over winter or storing it in a cellar may depend the yield and quality of the seeds harvested the following year. The growers must know whether their crops are selfor cross-pollinated and, if the latter, whether insects or wind carry the pollen. On such facts depend the necessary isolation distances between fields. Harvesting seeds differs with different vegetables, both in the method of cutting or the picking of the crop, as well as in the operating speed of the threshing machine. Seeds of fleshyfruited vegetables like tomatoes are extracted—often with variations of foodprocessing equipment—rather than threshed, as dry seeds are. YEARBOOK OF AGRICULTURE 1961