ARTESIAN WELLS — CORN -CRIB. 259 



and scraper to make a sloping ravine, which may be cultivated 

 and plowed across. They have sufficient fall to be kept 

 clean by the Spring rains. The cost of open ditching is from 

 twenty to fifty cents a rod, and they are always in running 

 order, if they are always worked across, allowing no bank to 

 form on each side to grow up. to weeds and prevent the water 

 from draining into the ditch. We have no tile drainage, and 

 but a very little land for which an open ditch is not preferable. 

 I think we have as good a farming country as there is in the 

 West, for raising the above named crops, and also for raising 

 stock. My aim is to feed the greater part of my grain to cattle 

 and hogs ; the cost of raising corn is about eighteen cents per 

 bushel, oats fifteen. Good farms, with good improvements,! 

 are worth from thirty to forty-five dollars per acre. i 



ARTESIAN WELLS. 



As we have no running streams, you may think it is a pretty { 

 dry place for a stock farm, but we have what is more desirable. ; 

 We can go on a dry piece of ground and bore a four-inch hole '< 

 from ninety to one hundred feet to rock, shove down a three- 

 inch gas pipe, drill ten or fifteen feet, and strike water that 

 rises to from twenty to thirty feet of the surface, put in a 

 pump and a wind-mill, and we have a never failing supply of 

 water. 



COMBINED HOG-HOUSE, GRANARY AND CORN-CRIB. i 



My corn crib is thirty-one by forty feet. Cribs ten feetv 

 wide, twelve feet high on the low side, and nineteen feet posts,; 

 next to drive way. The drive-way floor is elevated two feet.l 

 above the crib floors. The granary is above the driveway, and ■ 

 the hog house below the driveway floor. j 



My pastures are fenced with osage hedge, or three board 

 fence with two barb wires on top, making a durable; fence, and 

 one that turns every kind of stock. 



I always sow red clover with every kind of spaall grain. 

 I have clover hay, clover pasture, and clover to plow under for 

 enriching the land. My treatment of pasture is to sow red 



