FARM IRRIGATION 241 



when it will pay to irrigate in the East, especially 

 certain water-loving crops, as strawberries, celery, 

 raspberries, blackberries, grass, and garden vege- 

 tables. In the East, however, it is a question of 

 economics, not of necessity, as it is in many parts of 

 the West ; the point is whether the increase in crops 

 will pay for the extra expense. That depends upon 

 the character of the soil, the value of the land, its 

 nearness to market, the ease with which water may 

 be secured and distributed, and many other business 

 details. To illustrate: It mi^ht pay to irrigate 

 grass land in Connecticut, which has about forty 

 to fifty inches of rainfall, if there is a stream from 

 which water can be easily diverted and cheaply 

 distributed ; but it might not pay to build an expen- 

 sive storage reservoir for this purpose. It might 

 pay to irrigate a market garden on high-priced land 

 close to the city, on which the value of the crops 

 may reach $300 to $700 per acre, when it would 

 not pay to irrigate the same crops grown on cheap 

 land. It must be remembered, also, that irrigation 

 can rarely be practised in the East as economically 

 as it can in the West, because there the land has 

 a fairly uniform surface as a rule, while Eastern 

 farms are much more frequently irregular in con- 

 tour and difficult to irrigate. Moreover, it is 

 easier to hire skilled irrigators in the West than in 

 the East. Most Eastern irrigation, aside from cran- 

 berry and rice, is on market-garden crops in the 

 suburbs of large cities near the Atlantic seaboard. 

 As a general proposition, then, irrigation in 

 humid sections is a matter of expediency; it may 

 pay or it may not, according to the conditions. It 

 is an entirely different question here from what 

 it is in arid regions ; there irrigation is the only way 

 to make farming pay. One disadvantage of 



