DEVELOPMENT OF METHODS OF DRAININCx IRRIGATED 



LANDS. 



By C. G. Elliott, Chief of Drainage Investigations. 



INTRODUCTION. 



The necessity of draining irrigated lands in the arid sections has 

 become apparent to those who have been intimately associated with 

 their reclamation and subsequent management. The subject has a 

 peculiar significance to the owners of lands which have succumbed to 

 the inroads of seepage, as excessive moisture is usually called, many 

 acres of which have been abandoned by the owners and are no longer 

 classed as productive property. The fact that large areas of excel- 

 lent farming and high-j^riced fruit land have been ruined or seriously 

 injured in each of the States where irrigation is practiced furnishes a 

 sufficient reason for making a careful examination of the methods 

 which have been developed through the efforts of engineers and 

 exjDerts of this office for preventing the extension of such injury in 

 localities where evidences of it appear and of restoring such lands to 

 a productive condition. (PI. XXIII, fig. 1.) One of the serious and 

 distressing features associated with seeped irrigated land is that a 

 highly productive and prosperous ranch may often be found adjoin- 

 ing another Avhich has been seriously injured or wholly ruined by 

 seepage, both having been reclaimed at the same cost and which were 

 originally equal in productive value. The oft-repeated statement 

 that the condition of the latter is due to careless or unskillful man- 

 agement on the part of the owner is not usually sustained by the 

 facts in the case. The seepage of land is more often due to natural 

 conditions which exist beneath the surface, the effect of which can 

 not be anticipated, than to any indications which are visible at the 

 time the land is first watered. Hence the keen disappointment which 

 the owner feels when seepage and, in some cases, alkali attacks por- 

 tions of his ranch, and it is not surprising that he casts about for 

 some remedy or possibly abandons the field to salt-grass pasture, 

 alkali bog, or, in the later stages of saturation, to the tule swamp. 

 The hardship which such conditions work upon the less fortunate 

 owner is easy to see, and suggests the thought that there is a certain 

 community of interest among owners of irrigated farms which should 



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