34 VERMONT AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



motes bacterial growth and thus develops actual from potential 

 plant food. 



4. Weather Conditions. 



The use of commercial fertilizers cannot alter the weather ; 

 but it may serve to even up matters, to act as it were as an in- 

 surance policy, augmenting the yields of unfavorable seasons and 

 thus approximating those of more favorable ones, increasing yields 

 and profits when the heavens are propitious and lessening losses 

 when the skies lower. The climatic vagaries which are most apt 

 to be harmful during the growing season are a lack of or an ex- 

 cess of rain. The lack may be supplied artificially from ex- 

 traneous sources ; the excess is removable by drainage ; and each, 

 but more particularly the former, is more or less amenable to 

 control through the intelligent handling of tillage tools. 



5. Soil Moisture Control, 

 irrigation. 



Irrigation supplies crops with water, plant food, or both. 

 The practice has been in vogue from remote antiquity. Millions 

 of acres in foreign countries and vast areas in the arid and semi- 

 arid West are under irrigation. Many a desert soil is such be- 

 cause of lack of water. Well stocked with available plant food, it 

 is valueless without and valuable with the access to water which 

 irrigation affords. The sole difference between the oasis and the 

 desert which surrounds it is that which the water creates. 



Most Eastern readers are apt to conceive of irrigation as a 

 project adapted to arid regions but of no service in regions where 

 the rainfall is moderately abundant and fairly well distributed. 

 It is freely conceded that it is not absolutely essential to profitable 

 agriculture in such sections, but that it is often highly profitable 

 under such conditions is recognized by the well-informed. Many 

 practical men, particularly market gardeners and small fruit grow- 

 ers, feel that they cannot afford to take the chances of a possibly 

 inadequate or ill-distributed rainfall, and therefore use an irriga- 

 tion plant as an insurance policy — insuring a maximum crop. 

 They install more or less expensive systems and spend consider- 

 able sums for water, to more than get it back again in the in- 

 creased sales of their products, which are themselves mostly wa- 

 ter. But costly devices are not needed. The many ponds, 

 streams and springs which beautify Vermont's landscape, as well 

 as its topography, lend themselves readily to the distribution and 

 use of water. Many a hillside spring, impounded by a small dam, 



