ARCTIC    STORM    GROWS    GREEN*    VEGETABLES
where wheat was thought impossible sixty years ago and
where some of the world's best qualities are grown now.',
Glavsevrnorput has opened 4 main agricultural stations
in the Far North: In Obdorsk, Igarka, Yakutsk and
Anadyrsk. From there 20 smaller experimental points are
controlled, 5 of them actually on the coast,
The problems which the 'farming battalion of the Polar
Army^5 must solve are the following:
 (1)	To drive up grain cultivation as near as possible to
the Polar regions in order to have a food base ai compara-
tively short distance of the actual Arctic colony,
 (2)	To  evolve typical specimens  of plants with short
growing seasons and the power to resist occasional mid-
August frosts.
 (3)	To develop methods by which the ripened plants can
be kept fresh over a period of two years.
The last point is essential because most of the plants
or cereals are only ready for harvest at a time when the
navigation season is already drawing to its close. It would
be no good to get crops in October—when the northern
parts of the river are covering themselves with ice. and navi-
gation in the Polar Sea can be stopped any moment by a
premature winter—or these crops would lose their vitamins.,
putrify, rot or send out shoots during the winter. After al!
they are not only needed to feed the local population in the
towns of the lower Polar regions. They are of even more
vital importance for the crews of Polar stations and air bases
high up on islands in the Arctic Ocean. The plants have to be
kept intact over the winter, and shipped off safely as soon
as the navigation season starts in the following summer. The
method, which Bogomolkin claims Ms department has
discovered and which, according to him, has proved
successful in 80 per cent of all cases is this: they construct
special large boxes in which the plants lie 'asleep^5 in carbon
monoxide. Certain rays, particularly X-rays, do the same
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