42 IRRIGATION FARMING. 



tolerant. In the semi-tropic regions, where frosts are 

 not severe, the imported Australian salt-bush, botani- 

 cally known as A triplex semibaccata , has proven emi- 

 nently satisfac5lory as a resistant, at the same time 

 proving a desirable browsing forage for live stock. 



The Flooding System. — The most effedlive 

 means of getting rid of ordinary white alkali is by 

 washing it out of the land. This can be accomplished 

 by digging open ditches at a lower level than the sur- 

 face of the land to be treated, and carrying them to 

 the nearest natural outlet. Then by running water 

 over the land into the drains without allowing it to 

 stand long enough to soak into the ground and carry 

 the dissolved alkali with it, most of the alkali that has 

 accumulated at the surface will be removed. By re- 

 peating this treatment a few times land can be prac- 

 tically freed from alkali, unless it is exceptionally bad. 

 Another plan is to use the blind ditcher, a machine 

 much like the old ox plows used in Illinois and Iowa 

 thirty years ago to make blind ditches along the prairie 

 sloughs. This implement is calculated to run ditches 

 from four to six inches lower than the plowed ground, 

 every sixty or eighty feet across the tilled ground, to 

 serve as drains. Another plan, and to our notion the 

 most practicable one suggested, as well as the most 

 expensive, is to underlay alkali land with vitrified 

 sewer pipe. This will last a lifetime and will certainly 

 get away with the alkali. 



In many cases the over-irrigation of bench or slope 

 lands has caused first the lower slopes and then the 

 bottom lands to be overrun with alkali salts, although 

 before irrigation was pra(5liced these lands were exempt 



