296 AGRICULTURE 



avoids the steep grade and enables him to carry his produce at 

 one load instead of two. 



Drainage. Drainage is another important point. Water is 

 the great road destroyer. It makes mudholes on level land, 

 gullies on hills, and ruts everywhere. The only way to protect a 

 road against injury from surplus water is to have on each side 

 ditches below the level of the roadbed. 



The roadbed should be highest in the middle and slope to each 

 side, having a fall of one inch to each two or three or four feet. 

 Surface ditches should never cross the road; there should be 



CROSS SECTION OF A GOOD ROAD AND A BAD ROAD 



The good road slopes to the sides ; the bad one, indicated by dotted line, slopes to the 



middle. 



underdrains for this purpose. There should be underdrains in 

 low wet places also. These should be either tile drains or ditches 

 filled with stones and brush as described on page 88. 



Surface. - Another matter of importance is the road surface. A 

 hard smooth surface is best. On a steel road one horse can pull 

 as much as twenty on a common dirt road. The best roadbed is 

 steel; next to that is. stone. A good durable road is made by 

 putting a layer of hard, broken stone on a good foundation, then 

 a layer of smaller stones, crushed and rolled so as to obtain a hard, 

 smooth surface. The first cost of steel or stone roads is large, 

 but they are so durable and require so few repairs that they are 

 cheap in the long run. On an old road in New Jersey twenty- 

 five baskets of produce was considered a load; the dirt road 

 was replaced by a well-graded stone one, and on this a hundred or 

 a hundred and twenty-five baskets of produce are carried at a load. 



