THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



209 



for about 7 cents a foot. This plan does away with 

 the use of both drop boxes and ditch spouts. 



How often to irrigate and how much water to ap- 

 ply must be decided by each individual in accordance 

 with the character of his soil and the crop he wishes 

 to produce. One experienced irrigator says : 



"You can't irrigate by the clock. You must put 

 water on when the crops need it and take it off when 

 the want is supplied. Enough water is better than too 

 much. Two irrigations are usually sufficient for a 

 crop of alfalfa or grass. Four or five are required for 

 young orchards. Melons and beets should have no water 

 for some time previous to maturity of the crop. Al- 

 falfa, clover and timothy should have no water during 

 the maturing of the seed if seed is desired. Some fore- 

 sight is required in using the water at your command, 

 so that sections of the land may be irrigated consecu- 

 tively for economy of both water and labor of apply- 



Much of the land was acquired in the first place by 

 homestead entry in quarter sections. In course of time 

 many of the original homesteads were divided into 

 80-acre and 40-acre tracts, and others were increased 

 to 240 and 320-acre tracts. The average size of the 

 farms at the present time is probably not far from 100 

 acres. In Gallatin Valley water for irrigation is dis- 

 tributed for the most part in continuous streams, because 

 the farms are large and an irrigator receives as much 

 through his head gate as he can properly take care of. 

 Instead of having the water turned off when one part 

 of his holding is irrigated he applies it on another tract, 

 and when all of the land on a farm of 160 acres has 

 received one irrigation it is usually time to begin to 

 apply the second. Such a: practice would be entirely 

 unsuited to the small farms of Utah, for example, for 

 the reasons that it would involve a needless waste of 

 labor and expense in irrigating, and a continuous stream 



Fig. 2. Furrower Used by D. C. Wheeler, Reno, Nev. 



ing it. Above all, watch your work. Do not start the 

 water over a field and then go to town to spend the bal- 

 ance of the day. Each little stream requires attention." 

 One of the Sunnyside irrigators, with much com- 

 mendable pride, showed the writer a field of sandy 

 slope which he had seeded, and in the process he "had 

 not lost a barrel of water." It had all been used upon 

 the land. 



IRRIGATION BY FLOODING IN GALLATIN VALLEY, MONT. 



In Montana the usual method of irrigation is by 

 flooding between field ditches. Alfalfa, timothy, blue 

 joint, clover, pasture lands, and cereals are irrigated in 

 this way. With a few exceptions, the only other method 

 practiced is furrow irrigation, and it is confined to 

 vegetables, root crops, and orchards, the total acreage 

 of which is small in comparison with that in grain 

 and forage crops. Fully 90 per cent of the water util- 

 ized each season is distributed over the fields in small 

 field ditches and spread over the land from openings 

 made in the ditch banks. The methods of apply- 

 ing water as practiced by the Gallatin Valley farmers 

 have been introduced with certain modifications into 

 many of the other farming districts of the State. 



apportioned to a field of from ten to twenty acres would 

 be too small to be distributed to advantage and would be 

 wholly absorbed by portions of the field before it covered 

 the remainder. 



In grain fields the distances between the field 

 ditches vary from sixty to ninety feet and probably aver- 

 age about seventy-five feet. The ditches are made with 

 a fourteen or sixteen-inch double-moldboard plow at- 

 tached to a sulky frame which is drawn by three horses. 



The ditches are cleaned out with a fourteen or 

 sixteen-inch steel shovel (Fig. 27) attached to a beam 

 having handles like those of a walking plow and drawn 

 by one horse. This implement also forms the earth 

 dams in the ditches and is locally styled a: dammer. 

 The horse walks in the furrows made by the ditch 

 plow, and the loose earth in the bottom and sides is 

 carried forward by the steel shovel and dumped in a 

 heap by simply raising the handles which guide the 

 dammer. If sufficient earth for each dam is not ob- 

 tained in the first trip the horse is driven back along 

 the furrow and more deposited as needed. These dams 

 or earth checks are usually about sixty feet apart. 



A stream of, say, 100 miner's inches is turned 



