60 MINNESOTA STATE: HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
that, and if we put together our experiences and what we know, 
we can get some good out of it. While windmills are doing a 
good deal of work in many places, I think that matter is just in 
its infancy. Icall this windmill power better than any other, 
but I believe it is only partially developed; it is in its infancy. 
If several mills could be used, several mills put together, and 
I think that could be done, I believe that is going to let us out, 
and I believe that will make this matter of irrigation a success. 
The water at the experiment station has to be lifted two hun- 
dred feet and it takes an immense amount of power to do that. 
One of the largest size steel windmills will raise a large 
amount of water, perhaps 600 barrels in twenty-four hours. It 
is possible to do that if you have a good wind exposure. I think 
we will develop in the end a system of wheels which will act 
together todo the work, perhaps three or five, or something 
like that number, and that is the cheapest power onearth when 
developed. 
Prof, Hays: I want to say just one word. The windmills 
where they have been tried have not generally got along well. 
People have become discouraged with their windmills. 
Theoretically it is a cheap power, but they will not do enough 
work at the right time. We only want to irrigate at the right 
time, and I am looking for the solution of this question to ma- 
chinery power, engines. 
OUR SEARCH AFTER WATER. 
S. D. RICHARDSON, WINNEBAGO CITY. 
The past few years have been so dry that at times the nurseryman 
and others engaged in the culture of small fruits, have had to 
have more water to insure a good crop than fell from the sky inthe 
course of the summer. The object of the present paper is to give a 
brief account of the methods we resorted to, to overcome the want 
of sufficient rainfall. When we settled in Winnebago City in the 
spring of 1885, there was a piece of land on one side of the field con- 
taining a little more than two acres, that was of little practical use, 
A pond or slough that, when the country was first settled, never 
went dry, occupied part of it, and the rest was either so dry orrough 
that it would yield but little hay. 
We dug an open ditch, run off the surface water, sowed some 
clover seed and for several years used it to pasture a cow. But the 
open ditch was a nuisance and so was a grass patch in a plowed 
field; so we broke it up, put in some seventy rods of tile, and now it 
is the most valuable land we have. The bed of the slough, some 
thirteen rods in diameter, neither gets too wet nor too dry. We had 
four rows of strawberries through the center of the piece the past 
summer, and while those on the dry land were nearly a failure, 
ety 
