In the 20-ies of XX century the term "varietal testing" meant one of the final stages of the varietal work, due to which the results of the selection achieved by the station and also were specified, as well as the quality of the varietal seeds and their degree of adaptation to the soil and climatic conditions. Today, this definition has not lost its content and means the study and evaluation of a new variety of hybrids, conducted on biologically and agriculture indicators compared to the zoning variety.

The proposed study is intended to draw the attention of both scientists and persons of agrarian businesses to the problem of sugar beet production in Ukraine, which today requires the modernization of the scientific and institutional complex, in the production, checking and outspreading of highly productive varieties, in particular. As history shows, in the last century our state was the main supplier of sugar raw materials in the Soviet Union. Sugar beet varieties created by Ukrainian breeders compete with Western European ones. Due to the initiation of varietal zoning in the early 1930s, native sugar production made it possible to receive high yields of this crop with high sugar content in root crops. Previously to this initiation was the organization of a network of variety testing points, where scientific and methodological approaches were carried out to check the varietal parameters of sugar beet. The first professional association that draw the attention to the problem of variety testing was the All-Russian Society of Sugar Producers with its network of research fields.

In 1921, it was transformed into the Varietal and Seed production Department of the Tsukrotrest (eng. Sugar Trust) (VSPD), which became the founder of the collective variety testing.

The target of the proposed publication is to highlight the scientific and organizational aspect of the implementation of collective testing of sugar beet by specialists of the research institutions of the VSPD in the 1920s of the XX century.

Today there is a profound historical study of the development of native variety testing of agricultural crops, prepared by P.M. Vasyliuk in 2013.

Its content reveals a general trend in the evolution of scientific views and state regulation of the activity of network of variety testing plots in the territory of Ukraine without detailing the individual cultures.

Applying both general scientific and special historical methods of research (historiographic analysis, generalization, systematic, etc.), the role of the VSPD of Tsukrotest in the establishment of a single state network of variety testing points is revealed. It has been found that in 1922, at the Third Congress of breeders and seed scientists, organized by the Scientific Council of the VSPD Tsukrotest published the methodical recommendations for the implementation of comparative variety tests were summarized in a single Instruction. Among its developers, the most famous scientists were I.I. Voitkevich, E.Yu. Zalenskyi, B.A Panshin, V.I. Sazanov, O.K. Filipovsky, B.M. Lebedinsky and others. Thus, instruction was introduced for the first time to be mandatory for all research institutions of the subordinate network by the Department’s specialists. At that time, the best method of variety testing was considered to be "standard", which involved the representation of indicators in percents of the standard, or comparison with the average standard.

The perspctive of further scientific research within the presented topic is a historical and comparative analysis of the sugar beet variety testing by different scientific and professional associations operating in the territory of Ukraine (All-Ukrainian Seed Society, Territorial Agricultural Societies, Agricultural Scientific Committee of Ukraine, etc.).

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