132 REPORT OF THE CHEMIST OF 



VI. TILE DRAINING IN RELATION TO FLOOD AND DROUGHT. 



The soil supply of water for crops is so intimately related to plant growth 

 that any cause capable of seriously disturbing the supply of soil water 

 through the growing season should be regarded with concern. The condi- 

 tion of the water in the soil has an important bearing on the subject. Water 

 held by capillarity in the soil is better suited to supply the plant than free 

 water, which will flow under the action of gravity. 



Drainage may have for its object the removal of surface water of ponds and 

 marshes (ditches), or the removal of excess of water in the soil (tile draining). 

 The removal of stagnant surface water from marshes and bogs by ditching 

 is sanctioned by the great mass of intelligent farmers ; to replace a foul 

 swamp by a rich meadow meets with just approval. Not only is the useful 

 area of the farm increased, but the general health is promoted. By the 

 government surveys about one-ninth of the lower peninsula of Michigan was 

 returned as swamp land. By a system of county and town drainage pro- 

 vided by State law, and by appropriations of swamp lands for extended 

 systems of drainage, these swamp lands have been reclaimed in large por- 

 tions of our State, and with such manifest benefit to the public health that 

 three-fourths of the malarial diseases that prevailed in our State prior to 

 such swamp drainage have been driven from our borders. The benefit, both 

 to the farmer and the people at large, is so pronounced that a proposition to 

 return these rich meadows to reeking swamps, with the attendant fevers 

 and suffering, would receive small encouragement from any class. Our 

 people prefer the harvest gathered by a Buckeye reaper, rather than that of 

 the skeleton reaper with his invisible scythe. 



Yet the gain from this system of surface drainage is not an unmixed good. 

 Every deviation from nature's plan seems to bring in its train retribution in 

 some form. The ready and rapid flow of surface water by open ditches 

 augments the flood at times of thaw or heavy rains ; and, by diminishing the 

 area of evaporation, makes the air more arid in times of drought. These 

 results are inseparable from free drainage by open ditches. So far as I have 

 observed the open ditches make the floods more severe, they come more sud- 

 denly, rise higher and subside quicker than in the olden time before the 

 swamps were drained, and while the face of the country was mostly covered 

 with forests. These alternations of flood and drought are the joint results 

 of ditching and deforesting. Yet the good secured so far overbalances the 

 incident evil that no return to the primeval condition is to be expected in 

 our State. We simply accept the fugitive evil as the price for the perma- 

 nent good. 



Some writers in the agricultural press aver that tile draining increases the 

 evils of open-ditch drainage, that " the 95,000 miles of tile drains in Illinois, 

 and perhaps a third as much in length of open ditches, together with a pro- 

 portionate measure of both in Iowa and Indiana, have reduced these States 

 to the natural condition of Kansas by removal of all surplus surface water, 

 * * * affording creeks dry beds six months in the year, lowering the well 

 water level twenty feet in twenty-five years, partially suppressing the origin 

 of summer thunderstorms, and, in short, changing the climate and surface 

 aspect of the country in course of settlement dating back not more than 50 

 years quite as much as 500 years of similarjexcesses have done for the middle 

 and south of Europe." 



