Bulletin No. 176 - Potato Improvement by Hill Selection

Potatoes are such an important food and are grown on so many farms in Utah that any method of permanently improving the crop is highly desirable. Commercial producers can of course capitalize any practical method of potato improvement. This field of experimentation is not new, for many workers have attempted to improve the potato crop by selection. Success, however, has been neither uniform nor always appreciable; many of the experiments were of short duration, and many were not conducted on a sufficiently large scale to be good tests. It is apparent from this meager statement that the possibilities of potato selection are by no means exhausted. To select individual plants of good appearance and high yield is easy. To get a pedigreed strain that is not only a good yielder itself but that transmits the power of superior yield to. its off-spring is another question, and one of infinitely greater importance. It is on this problem that the tests here reported have bearing