AGRICULTURE. 269 



and 5,000 acres; Mariposa, with 60 ditches and 210 acres; 

 Los Angeles, with 52 ditches and 18,200 acres; Tuolumne, 

 with 2 ditches and 15,000 acres; San Joaquin, with 2 ditches 

 and 3,000 acres ; Alpine, with 2 ditches and 2,500 acres ; and 

 Calaveras with 27 ditches and 272 acres. 



Most of the irrigation works which existed before 1872 were 

 of little relative importance ; they supplied less than one acre 

 in a thousand, and most of them were very costly, compara- 

 tively, on account of their small size. California is now about 

 to enter on the era of irrigation. The first of the new ditches 

 that of the San Joaquin and King's River Canal and Irriga- 

 tion Company supplies 15,000 acres with irrigation this year. 

 It is thirty-eight and a half miles long, fifty-five feet wide, 

 four feet deep, has a descent of one foot to the mile, and runs 

 northwestward from the bend of the San Joaquin River. 

 About half of the land irrigated is in grain, and half in al- 

 falfa. The experience so far is most encouraging, the irrigated 

 land all producing large crops, even where the soil is poor ; 

 while the richest soil, above the level of the ditch, yields 

 nothing. In addition to the 15,000 acres, 60,000 more can 

 be irrigated from this ditch, so far as completed. It is pro- 

 posed to extend the ditch forty miles, to San Joaquin City, on 

 the San Joaquin River, with a grade of half a foot to the mile. 

 The extension will supply water to 250,000 acres, making the 

 total area for the entire ditch, 325,000 acres. At twenty 

 bushels to the acre, that ditch alone will secure a production 

 of 6,000,000 bushels of wheat from a district that was long 

 considered worthless for tillage, and that has never yet pro- 

 duced 60,000 bushels, though thousands of acres have more 

 than once been sown there. 



The King's River Irrigation Company take out water from 

 King's River, where it enters the San Joaquin plain on the 

 north side. The ditch is thirty feet wide and three feet 

 deep, with a grade of a foot to a mile. The supply of water 

 is sufficient for 300,000 acres, and there would be no serious 

 difficulty in enlarging the canal to take out all the water. 



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