Plantbreeding at Svalöf - continued...

If Nilsson-Ehle saw himself forced to return to the standards of carrying out and recording breeding experiments in place at Svalöv – after all, he was an employee of the experimental station –, or if he hoped to hit upon a stable, promising type combining high yields with winter hardiness in the third generation – in this he admittedly saw himself deceived (Nilsson-Ehle 1924) – is a matter of speculation. It is interesting, however, to see, how each new paradigm of ‚scientific' breeding at Svalöv struggled to establish itself in a preformed context of ‚practical' breeding, with 'scientific' and 'practical' not marking the two poles of an opposition, but rather relative positions on a continuous scale. An illustration from a monograph describing work at Svalöv, which was published in 1912 for the Canadian Seed Grower's Association (Newman 1912, 88), nicely demonstrates how each of the breeding methods developed at Svalöv – mass selection, pedigree breeding, and Mendelian hybridization – presupposed the other, both historically and practically.