AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 



The first three items are, directly or indirectly, 

 government enterprises, the last four otherwise. 



The lesson of the figures is, of course, that the 

 building up of the far west is due to individual, 

 corporate, and co-operative enterprise just as 

 other parts of the country have been developed 

 and built up by the American spirit and purpose. 

 The government projects are professedly to cover 

 conditions which can not be subdued by individual 

 or associated enterprises, and they are therefore 

 grandly supplementary to various forms of private 

 enterprise in the development of the country, but 

 to the people, either individually or in a self-organ- 

 ized way, is due the credit of bringing the American 

 Desert to its present estate of prosperous and pro- 

 gressive commonwealths. 



FOURTH : THE MASTERY OF TILLAGE. Tillage may 

 be characterized as the one indispensable thing and 

 therefore most fundamental in Pacific Coast agri- 

 culture. It sustains the closest possible relations 

 both to irrigation and to farming by natural mois- 

 ture, or "dry-farming," as it has come to be called. 

 Tillage is the sheet anchor of dry farming and 

 optimistic estimation of its services is naturally 

 leading to some misconceptions and possibly to dis- 

 appointments and hardships. Because some are 

 claiming that tillage will produce water and gather 

 to the soil moisture which does not fall in rain or 

 snow, and are, therefore, undertaking farming op- 

 erations in places where the total precipitation is 

 less than the requirements of even the most drought- 

 enduring crop. The fact is, of course, that tillage 

 does not produce water, but saves the greater part 

 of it for the uses of the crop the greatest possible 

 part of it, if the tillage be the best and most timely. 

 The recent agitation of the subject is calculated to 

 advance a notion that tillage is of enormously 

 greater value in its contribution to dry farming 

 lands than to lands cropped by irrigation. Possibly 

 it may produce a greater total value because the 

 area which must be farmed in that way, if profit- 

 ably farmed at all, is much greater than the area 

 which can be brought under irrigation even if all 

 flowing waters and available subterranean waters 

 are brought upon the land by gravity ditches and 

 by pumps. It must, however, be claimed that 

 tillage has as important relations to irrigation in 

 general as to dry farming, and, when the measure 

 is made by equal acreage, tillage and irrigation 

 will produce immensely more than tillage and drv 

 farming can produce and this will be found true 

 in regions where the rainfall is ample for certain 



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