210 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



which can not be answered except by some such experiment as Mr. Wil- 

 liams reported. It is a matter that must be examined carefully before 

 any expenditure can be i)rofitably made. 



Mr. Vandervoort: Is it possible to irrigate a few acres with a driven 

 well, where you have to draw your supply from seventy feet? 



Prof. Taft: I think so. If one well will not do, drive four or five, and 

 pump from all, and have reservoirs to provide for the dry season. Store 

 up in advance, and use the water as necessary; but seventy feet are 

 rather more than I would care to pump. If you can get water within 

 thirty to forty feet, you can get twice the water with the same power 

 that you can at seventy feet. 



Mr. Morrill: Many of these tubular wells find water at seventy to one 

 hundred feet, and it rises readily to within twenty or thirty feet of the 

 surface. It is the water level that counts. 



Prof. Taft: By the use of gasoline engines, something of that kind, 

 that you can rely on to furnish power, you can irrigate sandy soil and get 

 a large amount of water upon it. In this section there are a number of 

 pumping plants, using in some cases traction engines, and pumping 

 perhaps, in one case, a thousand gallons per minute — thirty barrels, per- 

 haps, per minute. That comes from several driven wells fastened to- 

 gether. Smaller plants have a smaller number of wells and apply directly 

 to the surface. 



Mr. Tracy: In southwestern Kansas, near Garden City, the majority 

 of the tarmers have individual irrigating plants. Those plants are, with- 

 out exception (I have seen hundreds of them and examined many of 

 them), run by windmills of the ordinary size seen on farms, or perhaps a 

 twelve-foot mill, and they use a pump made especially for the purpose, 

 of greater calibre than the ordinary pump. The ordinary pump is seven 

 inches — that is, the tube is seA^en inches in diameter, and they pump the 

 water into earthen reservoirs, built by scraping out the soil, the man doing 

 it hiraself during the winter months; and they line these reservoirs with 

 puddled clay and with brick laid sidewise, and then covered with cement 

 or clay; and then are careful to keep this full during the winter to prevent 

 injury from frost. In one case I found a man had protected his by cover- 

 ing it with coarse manure; but those plants are to be seen everywhere 

 near Garden City, and they have revolutionized the whole country. I 

 would say that thousands of dollars have been spent by eastern capital- 

 ists in that same section, running irrigating ditches from the river, and 

 these iu.dividual plants which pump up the water are evidently going 

 to lead to disuse of the ditch almost entirely. These individual plants 

 have been proven to be the most profitable way and the cheapest, to solve 

 the problem in that section, and I have often thought that in Michigan, 

 with all due respect for the possibility of irrigation on those desert plains, 

 that there is no state in this country where the possibilities of advantage 

 and of added profit are so great, from irrigation, as in the state of Michi- 

 gan. As I pass through the state onthecars,it is rarely that there is not in 

 sight from the car window some field which, if the soil is suitable, is so 

 located that it is perfectly possible to irrigate it and make it profitable. 

 I believe that in the future this question of irrigation will come to be one 

 of the factors which will help greatly in solving the problem of profitable 

 farming in Michigan. 



