A SYSTEM OF AQUATIC FARMING 85 



NEEDED: A SYSTEM OF AQUATIC FAEMING 



By Profkssor HERBERT OSBORN 

 OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY 



THEEE is a natural resource available in many parts of the country, 

 indeed, on a large number of farms or in larger unused tracts of 

 the entire Atlantic and Mississippi Valley region, that is not only almost 

 wholly neglected, but the neglect of which involves a number of phases 

 of economic loss. This loss becomes more serious and the reparation 

 the more difficult as time passes, and hence a note of warning and 

 appeal seems justified. 



The present tendency is to reduce not only all accessible forest areas 

 to ordinary farm cultivation, but by drainage of all possible swamp 

 areas to still further increase the area for ordinary tillage and to 

 decrease those tracts which have in some degree the function of holding 

 and regulating the outflow of our rainfall. 



Without attempting to discuss all the economic problems connected 

 with this phase of the subject, we may note that it affects the con- 

 stancy of water level over considerable areas, the flow of streams with 

 its bearings on flood disasters and navigation, but perhaps more vitally 

 the carriage of fertility from the farming regions to the sea, where, 

 if it ever becomes available as a human resource, it is so remotely 

 advantageous to the farm or to the nation that it must be counted an 

 economic loss. 



The assumption seems to have been, based, doubtless, on our knowl- 

 edge of but one kind of farming, that every bit of land not under 

 ordinary farm culture Avas a loss, and therefore to be transformed as 

 rapidly as possible to cultivated fields. To this end, forests have been 

 felled, and lowland swamps and marshes, even including many extensive 

 and valuable bodies of shallow water, have been drained. This means 

 that instead of acting as natural reservoirs and conservators of moisture 

 and fertility, their surplus moisture content has been discharged as 

 rapidly as possible into the rivers and so on to the seas. 



Before making some suggestions as to systems of farming by which 

 it seems possible to avoid this waste, and, on the other hand, to develop 

 some most productive sources of wealth, it will be in place to call 

 attention to the capacity for production resident in every permanent 

 body of water. 



Every one is familiar with the rank growth of swamps and lowlands 

 and the most superficial observation will reveal the enormous masses of 



