| Summary: | 153 logda while the seed crop fails toward the southern limitations, apparently for want of varieties or strains which may insure productiveness in the presence of high summer temperatures and irregularly occuring drought visitations. Here, also, the crop of Southern Russia, as elsewhere in southern regions, conies into competition with other crops which demand less rigorous types of labor for equivalent cash returns. Thus, in Russia, the finest, largest growths of fibre plants are obtained in the governments of Vologda and Archangel on a line almost directly northward from Vologda, where the peasant farmers practically make no attempt to ripen flaxseed for seeding purposes, almost always sending for it to the more southern governments of Viatka, Yaraslav and Pskoff. This, of course, has been found by them to be a practical necessity, due probably largely to their careless methods of farming and to their belief that flax is not quite capable of reaching proper maturity with them. This; as in the case of the Hollanders and Irish people, is probably only an imaginary necessity. It may be the cheapest source of obtaining seed, but it is certainly a bad principle in farming to assume that it is impossible to properly develop the seed of a standard' crop in a region in which it is being grown. When this assumption is once made by the farmers of a particular region, that crop is sure to be a more or less irregular one, and the farmers gain no advantage from natural soil and climatic selection, which is undoubtedly the most important feature connected with the proper development of an agricultural crop. In America the progress of the flax crop practically reverses the relation of climate as compared to that which is noticed in Eastern Europe. There the farmers raise seed flax in the more southern districts, here the yield seems to be heavier as the crop is grown farther and farther northward until the regular annual coming of the autumn frosts cuts short the certainty of maturing. Parallels of latitude are, of course, not true gauges of the range of a crop. Temperature associated with rainfall, atmospheric humidity and soil type, . directly govern plant distribution. Generally speaking, the crop may be said to grow best on the cold side of the temperate region. From a general survey of the different general regions in which it is cultivated, as, for example, Northwest Russia, Northwest Holland, North and East Ireland, the northwestern states of the United States, and Southern Argentine, it can hardly be doubted that "common flax" 21 x 14 cm. Fargo : North Dakota Agricultural College, Government Agricultural Experiment Station for North Dakota, 1906. Bulletin no. 71. p. [139]-215.
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