122 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



for life. Without it death comes to every living thing, be 

 it animate or inanimate. No man of ordinary intelligence 

 but knows enough of the methods in the laboratory of 

 nature to understand that all plant food mu»t be rendered 

 soluble before it can be assimilated by the plant ; therefore 

 all fertilizers of every name and nature are dependent upon 

 water to render them available. Therefore the first thought 

 of the cultivator of the soil should be, How best can I secure 

 the necessary moisture to enable the plant to fulfil its 

 mission ? 



I am not here to-day to explain to you how this may be 

 done by some system of irrigation, although I believe that 

 the day is not far distant when our streams and lakes shall 

 be made to minister to the needs of the growing plant. In 

 proof of my faith in this I put in an irrigation plant last 

 spring, a fourteen horse-power gasoline engine (New Era) , 

 and a rotary pump capable of pumping three hundred gal- 

 lons per minute, but the season was such that it was not 

 needed. In fact, some of my strawberry grounds were 

 flooded at times ; and just here comes in one of the advan- 

 tages secured by the system which I shall proceed to show 

 you as one of the ways, and one available to every man who 

 tills the soil, of conserving and retaining the moisture in it 

 for the uses of the plant. 



Let us consider for a few moments the character of very 

 much of the soil that we see in travelling over the country. 

 Is it not a recognized fact that very much of it is compact 

 and hard? A compact soil is necessarily a dry one. Water 

 may fall upon it, but it will not be absorbed because of the 

 lack of vegetable matter, humus, to render it porous by 

 being incorporated with the soil by proper cultivation, which 

 must be done before it can be made productive. 



Humus or vegetable matter thus becomes the key that 

 unlocks the resources of nature and enables that other 

 element, the air, to permeate the soil and deposit its mois- 

 ture, starting into activity what Professor Roberts so aptly 

 terms " our invisible friends," the microbes, and acting upoji 

 the mineral elements renders them soluble and food for 

 plants. The amount of moisture stored up in this way 

 must depend upon the depth of soil that is rendered porous 



