22 SALT LAKE COMMERCIAL CLUB 



REDEEMING ALKALINE LANDS 



BY 



E. D. BALL, DIRECTOR, UTAH EXPERIMENT STATION. 



If the wealth of a state is to be measured by the amount of its 

 undeveloped resources, then Utah may be reckoned as one of the wealthy 

 states. 



At the present time, both Government funds and private capital in 

 large amounts are being used to develop new irrigated sections that will 

 ultimately bring greatly increased areas under cultivation, establish new 

 towns and cities and build up those already here. Some of these pro- 

 jects are far from markets and lack transportational facilities and even 

 with good soil and water, will develop slowly until these conditions 

 change. Without the irrigation project, these conditions would probably 

 never be changed and development of new territory without the "pio- 

 neer" stage is impossible. 



There are, however, immense areas in the state that are close to 

 established cities and towns, with transportation facilities already at 

 hand, which "offer just as tempting a field for investment as do the 

 irrigation projects now building. 



The "pioneering" in this case will have to be done by the company 

 that develops them and not by the settlers after they are developed and 

 there seems to be the rub, pioneering work is alright for the other 

 fellow. 



The areas referred to are the alkali flats west of Salt Lake City and 

 other similar tracts extending along the Wasatch Range. Taken alto- 

 gether there is an immense area of such land in the state. Land where, 

 if once reclaimed and made productive, the settlers could enjoy, right 

 from the start, all the advantages of proximity to markets, rural free 

 delivery and social and educational advantages of well developed com- 

 munities. 



Experiments already carried on by the Agricultural College and the 

 U. S. Government Drainage Department, working in co-operation have 

 shown that the alkali can be worked out of the land at reasonable cost 

 and that once the alkali is removed, the land can, with the time and labor 

 necessary to develop any virgin soil, be brought under cultivation and 

 profitable crops produced. 



Just why the lands have not been developed previous to this is hard 

 to understand. It certainly cannot be the cost, as experiments have 

 proven that it will cost less to reclaim this land than it will to furnish 

 water to any of the irrigated projects under way at the present time. ' It 

 certainly cannot be the lack of water to wash out the alkali because the 

 washing could be done in the spring or fall when the water was not in 

 use. It cannot be the time involved in the washing process, a matter 

 of two or three years, as many projects have taken much longer time 

 than that. The only apparent explanation is the one suggested before, 

 that corporations do not like to "pioneer." Their engineers have had 



