THE IEEIGATION AGE. 



749 



Notes on Practical 

 Irrigation 



D. H. Anderson 



Preparation of Soil for Planting. 



One great object of cultivating or tilling the soil is to 

 break up and loosen the earth, in order that the air may have 

 free access to the dead vegetable matter in it, as well as to 

 the living roots which spread and descend to considerable 

 depth beneath its surface. 



If it be desirable to have a luxuriant vegetation upon a 

 given field of land, that is, a good crop, one must either 

 select such kinds of seed as will grow in it, or which 'are 

 fitted to the kind of soil in which they are planted, or change 

 the nature of the soil so as to adapt it to the crop it is 

 desirable to raise. 



It is not denied that plants will grow in any soil that 

 contains the general elements essential to their existence, 

 but when the quantity and quality of the crop are considered 

 as of importance, it is useless to "guess," for only partial 

 satisfaction will result, and often entire failure, which is 

 usually attributed to the elements or to the wrath of Provi- 

 dence. 



Farming for profit means that the fanner knows every 

 foot of his land and the nature of the soil ; what it will grow 

 and what it needs. A lack of this knowledge is farming 

 for luck, and is equivalent to gambling with the eyes shut. 

 There is less labor and twice the profit in harvesting forty 

 bushels of wheat on an acre of properly cultivated soil than 

 forty bushels on two acres roughly tilled. The case is the 

 same with any sort of crop, and this is so plain that it seems 

 absurd to mention it, yet it is forgotten in numerous cases 

 of farmers, who go more on quantity of acreage than per- 

 fection of cultivation and increase of crop. It is not exten- 

 sive farming that pays so well as concentrated farming. A 

 man with one hundred acres well in hand is better off than 

 another with five hundred acres of struggling crops. Whole- 

 saling in any business is more expensive and the returns less 

 than in retailing, and every farmer knows perhaps by bitter 

 experience that everything about a farm it attended with 

 expense, if not always in cash money, then in a draft upon 

 his future strength and vitality. Irrigation, however, prom- 

 ises to be a cure for rambling farming, by compelling con- 

 centration. Why spread water over one hundred acres to 

 raise a sparse crop when the same or much less water will 

 secure a fine, luxuriant crop on twenty-five acres? When a 

 single grain of wheat may be made to stool out into sixty 

 plants, is it not better than when it stools out into only 

 twenty? The former shows health, vigor, and productiveness, 

 the latter mediocrity. The one means a syndicate, the other 

 a home. 



Soil is the Foundation. 



The new beginner, the small farmer, reads accounts of 

 the great farming schemes, the thousands and thousands of 

 acres which run bank accounts into five and six figures. He 

 dreams of gang plows, steam plows, combined harvesters and 

 reapers, his fat cattle upon a thousand hills, and he swells 

 himself up like the toad in the fable to equal the ox, and 

 bursts in his effort. Let the reader desirous of gaining a 

 competency through farming, acquire a home before he is 

 worn out in the struggle, before his patient wife sinks be- 

 neath the sod in the effort, and his children grow up into 

 cowboys, rustlers and desperadoes, imitate nobody, read none 

 of the glowing accounts of successful great farmers without 

 at the same time understanding that all such began, as a 

 rule, on enormous capital, took a magnificent ranch through 

 the early demise of a worn-out ancestor, through a mort- 

 gage foreclosure of some "imitator," or raises himself to 

 grandeur upon the cheap labor of his fellowmen. Let him 

 take the soil and treat it as the foundation for a home, for 

 plenty, and the other things will come to him. 



It was said in a former chapter that plants are like ani- 

 mals, in that to grow to perfection they must be properly 

 managed and fed. A half-starved hog produces poor bacon, 

 a chaff-fed horse has little energy, the wool of a starveling 

 sheep is coarse and wiry, and even a human being, limited in 

 his diet or restricted in nourishment, possesses a flabby. 



shriveled brain and a weak physical energy. Men say of 

 animals : prune, cultivate, select, feed ; of men, prune, culti- 

 vate, feed, and wherefore not say the same of plants and the 

 soil: prune, cultivate, feed? Herein is the whole science 

 of preparing the soil for cultivation, the heredity of plants, 

 their atavism, their environments, the survival of the fittest, 

 and whatever else may be said of animals and humanity. 

 But to return to the great vegetable kingdom. 



All of our practical writers agree, and the every-day 

 farmer knows by his personal experience, that as the sys- 

 tems of roots, branches and leaves are very different in dif- 

 ferent vegetables, so they nourish most in different soils. 

 The plants which have bulbous roots require a looser and a 

 lighter soil than such as have fibrous roots, and the plants 

 possessing only short fibrous radicles demand a firmer soil 

 than such as have tap roots or extreme lateral roots. But it 

 may be considered as a truism that shallow cultivation of the 

 soil always produces minimum crops, whereas maximum har- 

 vests are gleaned by deep plowing whatever may be the 

 plant. 



It is always a question of the ability of the roots to 

 reach out after food and their exposure to air. To com- 

 prehend this fully it should be considered that there is about 

 as much of the plant under ground as above it, and the 

 experienced farmer can always tell by the growth of his 

 crop above ground whether the roots are doing well under 

 ground, if the growth is not in accordance with the natural 

 progress of the plant, there is some obstacle below the sur- 

 face which can be removed by cultivation, the loosening up of 

 the soil to a sufficient depth. How quickly growing corn 

 revives and takes a new lease upon life after deep cultivation 

 between the rows ! Not shallow cultivating, or scratching 

 over the surface, but "deep plowing." Level with a shallow 

 cultivator afterward, of course, then hoe and see the stalks 

 shoot up. It is some trouble, certainly, but do you not depend 

 upon a good crop to make money, and to obtain a home? 

 It is also a trouble to raise a child, but when it grows up 

 straight, is not the labor more amply repaid than when it 

 grows up crooked or stunted? 



Cultivation Depends on Subsoil. 



The character of the cultivation, however, depends upon 

 the condition of the subsoil. Where that is hard or packed, 

 it must be broken through, and up, to permit root penetra- 

 tion. Frequently, not to say generally, there is moisture be- 

 neath the hard, packed subsoil, and by breaking through the 

 moisture finds its way up and "slakes" the hard pan or other 

 resistant subsoil. There is also a difference in cultivation 

 between the soils of the arid and the humid regions, dif- 

 ferences which are atmospheric and also in the quantity of 

 the organic elements which will be made apparent as we go 

 along. 



It seems unnecessary to repeat so simple a thing when it 

 should be as plain as day, that plants possess an instinct that 

 does not fall far short of the marvelous. For instance, in the 

 arid regions the plant sends its roots down deep and out in 

 every direction after the moisture which it apparently knows 

 it can not get at the surface or near it, whereas, in the humid 

 regions, the roots spread out more, because they apparently 

 know that the moisture is near the surface and they do not 

 Jiave to toil so hard to make their way down deep. Anyone 

 practicing surface irrigation will know that the roots of plants 

 which have a habit of penetrating deep into the soil, grow 

 along the surface, because the moisture is there. Plants 

 always adopt the easiest method of obtaining food. 



Now why do plants travel after moisture and not after 

 dry soil? It is not water plants need, nor is it moisture, but 

 it is food. They know that there is food material in the dry 

 soils, but it is not in a fit condition to be absorbed, whereas, 

 moisture prepares the food for them, hence they refrain from 

 pursuing the raw material and expend their energies in seeking 

 the manufactued product. Let a garden patch which ha 

 been kept moist, and in which the roots congregate, be al- 

 lowed to dry, and another patch that has been dry and away 

 from which the roots turn, be moistened, and the plants will 

 grow away from their former hunting ground and in the 

 direction of the new one. This is common observation. A 

 beet root has been known to travel sixteen feet in the direc- 

 tion of a well where it knew it could get a drink, although 

 plants, as a rule, are not drinkers but feeders of the most 

 pronounced Epicurean type. 



Deep Roots in Arid Regions. 



In the arid and semi-arid regions it is better to provide 

 for a deep burrowing of the roots, because when they fre- 



