Adjustment Request & Disposition

Go ahead and fill it in, it's the third copy and the third copy is ours. I type my own because the pool puts the lot in the variety box and then I'm hunting tins for an hour.

Here is the whole of it. A lady in Fort Dodge writes nothing came up. That sentence covers four different things: the lot was dead; the ground was cold and wet the week she sowed; she covered the beet a full inch when a quarter is plenty; or she planted fine and then got two inches of rain Saturday and the seed went to the low end of the row. Only the first one is ours. From this desk I cannot tell you which one it was, and neither can she, and neither can anybody.

So the policy — and I think it's a good policy, Mr. Vollmer wrote it in '68 — is we send the packet back out, no argument, same day if it's on my desk by three. A packet of Detroit Dark Red costs us eleven cents. A lady who tells her circle we argued with her costs us a catalog mailing, and the fall book is already at the printer with her name in the addressing plates.

Now, we do still check, because we like to know. Every lot leaves a retained sample in a numbered tin, so when 4471-B comes back at me I can pull the actual seed that went in her envelope. Four hundred seeds counted out, laid on damp blotter paper, into the warm cabinet at seventy-five degrees. Count sprouts at day seven, count again at day fourteen. Federal minimum on beet is sixty-five percent. This lot read eighty-one, which is good honest seed, and eighty-one percent in a nice loam is a full row and eighty-one percent in Webster County clay after a cold May is a lady writing us a letter. Both are true at once. That is the part of the job you have to be at peace with.

Fill any box. TAB or ENTER out of the deepest one and the form gives you the next. It's laid out so nothing gets left off.