466 THE MONTHLY BULLETIN. 



ground water is highest thronghont the district, the drainage pump has 

 held it down to a safe level, in spite of the high level of ground water in 

 all of the surrounding country. 



Drainage on Hansen Farm. 



During the progress of the drainage experiments on the Baker and 

 Dore tracts part of the work was done, at wages, by a comparatively 

 young farmer of the neighborhood who had seen his father's forty acres 

 grow from a land of tar weeds to a $20,000 vineyard and then back 

 again, after the rise of ground water and alkali, until for an entire year 

 prior to 1907 it was carried on the market without a buyer for about 

 one fifth of the former estimated value. AVhat this farmer got out of 

 his connection with the Baker and Dore tracts was more than his wages 

 and his contract price for pumping water during the construction 

 period. He got a knowledge of how to drain and an appreciation of 

 the results that could be made to follow. He already had twenty acres 

 of his own and about $600 in cash, and with the assistance of the Irriga- 

 tion Investigations in laying out his system set about draining his own 

 twenty acres, eighty acres on the home ranch, and an additional twenty 

 acres adjoining which he purchased. Joining his neighbor on the south, 

 whose forty-acre tract was in the original Taft-Hansen experiment of 

 the Bureau of Soils, he changed the original position of the Taft-Hansen 

 pumping plant, advanced $300 to the local power company to get their 

 power line made accessible, and zig-zagged a 6-inch and 8-inch line of 

 tile through the property from northeast to southwest to the collecting 

 sump and pumps. One 6-inch lateral was run north into a corner of 

 the sixty-acre home place ; and an 8-inch lateral was run east to tap the 

 land of his co-operating neighbor. 



This homemade drainage system on the Hansen farm was laid in 

 October and November, 1908. In 1909 ten acres were leveed, flooded, 

 and seedefl. This was added to by eight acres in 1910 and by nineteen 

 acres in 1911, and the work of flooding an additional forty acres will be 

 started as soon as water is available for the purpose in the canals. The 

 ?cre-cost of the drainage system was $12 on the F. W. Hansen forty 

 acres and $15 on the remaining eighty. Nineteen of the twenty acres 

 purchased on borrowed money in 1908 in 1912 yielded seven tons of 

 alfalfa per acre, according to the figures of the owner, which sold for $10 

 per ton, or a total of five times the original cost of the drainage system 

 for the same area. This land was seeded in 1909 and 1910. Another 

 nineteen acres seeded in the spring of 1912 and lying at the far diagonal 

 corner of the tract, in the same season gave a measured yield of ninety 

 tons of alfalfa, which if sold at the price brought by the alfalfa from the 

 other nineteen acres, viz, $10 per ton, would have paid the purchase 

 price of the twenty acres of which the nineteen acres is a part, plus the 

 original cost of the tile drains. This land has been flooded and drained 

 for three years prior to seeding. Of the nineteen acres, eight acres has 

 received its entire irrigation water — it Avas irrigated heavily four times 

 in 1912 — from the drainage pump, sustaining so far as is possible with 



