TWENTY FIFTH ANNUAL MEETING. 135 



especially for annual crops and truck garden crops, it can be made to 



pay. 



But I want to bring this thought before you: No one has any right 

 to talk about irrigation until he learns to save the water which the Lord 

 gives him; and even then, the man who makes the most out of irrigat'on 

 is the man who tills his land best. We are likely to think, especially 

 further east where commercial fertilizers are used more than here, that 

 the application of fertilizers to land will atone for poor cultivation. The 

 man who gets the most benefit out of fertilizers is the man who has his 

 soil in the best condition — the one who tills the best. 



The farmer has not half fertilized his land, and can not afford to put on 

 so much fertilizer. Likewise, a man can not afford to irrigate his land 

 unless he is thoroughly familiar with the effect of this dry earth mulch on 

 top of his land, which serves as a layer of non-conductive material 

 between the soil below and the air above, preventing the evaporation of 

 soil moisture. So the man who is not thoroughly convinced and does not 

 act upon his conviction that tillage is conservative of moisture, is not 

 the man to irrigate. 



Another difQculty is this: Our rain-fall is fitful and uneven. In some 

 parts of the arid regions of tho west and southwest, they can prognosti- 

 cate that there will be no rain for two or three months. We have lands 

 that have heavy sub-strata that hold the water like the bottom of a 

 dripping-pan, and if you get an inch of rainfall the dripping-pan runs 

 over, the water runs off and is lost. Then, as soon as the land becomes 

 too dry, it bakes. But if we have prepared our land, and put our reser- 

 voir down eight or ten inches, by good tillage, we can save our inch of 

 rainfall. If we prepare a soil reservoir and fill it full, and then nature 

 gives us rain, the pan runs over and we lose much more than we gain. 



Bear in mind, I am not depreciating the value of irrigation, because I 

 am convinced that some horticulturists must resort to irrigation; but it 

 is profitable only to those persons who are good cultivators also, and who 

 put suflScient energy into saving what water nature gives. In New York 

 we have an annual rainfall of thirty to forty inches, and more. In those 

 places where it is fifty inches, it would be folly to talk about irrigating, 

 and yet people are talking about it, at the same time that they hav^e 

 wasted fully one half the water the Lord has given them. 



The very most important feature of this whole discussion is the one 

 which always comes up with regard to the question of subsoil. The 

 deeper the bottom of our pan, the more water we can store. Subsoiling 

 increases the depth of our reservoir, lowers the bottom of the pan. Shall 

 we then subsoil our lands? That depends primarily on the character of 

 the land. Unless we have a hard bottom there is little use in subsoiling. 

 Subsoiling is necessary in the same places where irrigation may be profit- 

 able — for the raising of crops of high value, as in the growing of some 

 special kinds of nusery stock, truck, etc. I do not believe that subsoiling 

 is profitable on all orchard lands, because you can subsoil only once; 

 thereafter the soil reverts to its former condition. 



My first lesson in this was a piece of land twice as large as this room, 

 from which three feet of surface dirt had been taken off and a hard clay 

 left. We put on two heavy teams of horses to plow the land, and we 

 have subsoiled the land twice; but we found that it was nearly as hard in 



