CHAPTER IV. 



WATER 

 REQUIRE- 

 MENTS OF 

 PLANTS 



THE CONSERVATION or MOISTURE. 



No one should think that dry farming- is an attempt 

 to grow plants without moisture. Water is essential, 

 and how to save it for the use of the crop is the greatest 

 discovery of the age. 



There has been much speculation in regard 

 to the possible production of a crop with a cer- 

 tain amount of moisture. This interest has 

 arisen from experiments carried out in France 

 and parts of this country, which show the amount 

 of water taken up by plants and transpired from 

 their leaves to produce their growth. In one of 

 these experiments, it was shown that it took an 

 average of three hundred pounds of water taken 

 from the soil to produce one pound of dry matter. 

 On this basis, Headden made a calculation of the 

 approximate amount of water required for the 

 production of a twenty-five-ton crop of sugar 

 beets. Where sugar beets produce a large amount 

 of tops, these tops have been known to equal at 

 least ninety per cent, of the weight of the roots. 

 To grow twenty-five tons of beets, then, there 

 would be twenty-two and one-half tons of tops. 

 In the beets there would be five tons of dry mat- 

 ter, requiring fifteen hundred tons of water, and 

 the tops and beets together would require 2,175 

 tons. This amount of water would cover the 

 land to a depth of over nineteen inches, and on 



