1889.] PUBLIC DOCUMENT — No. 4. 195 



Mr. Walker. I have seen it. He commenced irrigation 

 twenty-five years ago, and has kept it up from that day to 

 this. The irrigation is not like the scientific irrigation you 

 will find on the other side of the water ; but he has main- 

 tained, as I understand it, crops of grass for twenty years 

 mainly without any manure, simply from water alone. 



Mr. Humphrey. He has a hundred acres that are under 

 irrigation. I have been all over them. He takes the water 

 from a pond that was a saw-mill pond, and takes it on the 

 upper side and irrigates by furrows led away down the hill. 

 He gets from seventy-five to one hundred tons of hay a year 

 from it, and Mr. Walker said it has been irrigated twenty- 

 five years. I was not aware of it. 



Question. Where does he get his water ? Is it sewage 

 water ? 



Mr. Humphrey. No, sir. It is Concord brook water 

 that runs through a pasture, a little brook that nobody cared 

 anything about, that nobody would interfere with the dam- 

 ming of; and by building a dam as long as this hall he makes 

 a pond of about forty acres, and in that pond he accumulates 

 water enough to draw from during the year as he wants it. 



Mr. Gold. You spoke of grass seed. Have you had 

 any experience with unhulled seed, such as we used to raise 

 ourselves, compared with the hulled seed, — hulled that we 

 now get in the market ? 



Mr. Walker. I have not. I buy the best seed I can, 

 the cleanest I can, from examination with a microscope and 

 taking the word of the seller, and deducting what I think is 

 reasonable from his statement ; and the result is, I get pretty 

 fair seed. I get some things I do not buy, l)ut I pay for 

 them. I do not get any more seed from having a few extra- 

 neous things thrown in than if the seed was pure, and hence 

 I get the yellow daisy once in a while. I have kept clear of 

 the Avhite daisy ; but if we get seed that has been injured by 

 wet, or immature seed, we Avill find sometimes that our gi'ass 

 does not come up to what we expected. Our poor crops of 

 hay are often due to lack of vitality and imperfections in the 

 seed. 



Mr. Gold. The sources of our seed are entirely difierent 

 from what they used to be. We used to raise seed which 



