164 



THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



greater convenience and profit tban out- 

 side purchases of such commodities would 

 entail. The butter, eggs, meat, fruit, veg- 

 etables, milk, honey, jellies, sauces, oil, 

 wine, etc., required by a family should, if 

 possible, be produced on the home acres, 

 though reserving enough space to produce 

 the surplus crop deemed most valuable for 

 the locality and surrounding conditions. 



Every foot of land should be made to 

 yield some profitable crop. The barbar- 

 ism of waste everywhere seen about the 

 large farm should have no place on the 

 snug little irrigated farm of the colonial 

 settlement. If the season will justify, two 

 or more crops of vegetables should be pro- 

 duced on the same ground each year, and 

 the land should thereby become better for 

 the extra cultivation and fertilizing. Every 

 scrap of fertilizing material should be 

 carefully preserved and applied to the 

 land in due season. Ashes and meat scraps 

 should be utilized in making soap where- 

 with to wash fruit trees, and leached ashes 

 should never be thrown into the street, but 

 applied to the land. A compost vat should 

 be a prominent feature of the small farm, 

 into which all material available for plant 

 food should go, to be prepared to nourish 



the growing crops. In short, the little ir- 

 rigated farm should be the owner's labor- 

 atory, wherein he should transmute the 

 air, the water, (he earth and the sunshine 

 into gold. 



It will be readily seen that the intensive 

 farmer here contemplated must be not only 

 intelligent but educated and industrious. 

 Backwoods methods will not win on such 

 a farm, and the man who knows too much 

 to learn anything about his business from 

 books' and papers should betake himself to 

 the desolate cattle or wheat ranch, for he 

 could not succeed on the small, neat, well- 

 ordered farm of ten or twenty acres. The 

 ablest lawyers are they who know most of 

 the precedents long established, and the 

 physician ignorant of the best work of 

 others in his profession would be justly 

 set aside for a man of the times. It is the 

 same with the farmer. He who depends 

 upon his own knowledge and experience 

 alone is too often trying to do a large busi- 

 ness on a very small capital. To read, to 

 study, to experiment, to think and to rea- 

 son are absolutely essential to success on 

 the small irrigated farm, and he who is 

 above or below this plane would better be- 

 take himself to other fields of endeavor. 



DEVICE FOR MEASURING WATER. 



