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THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



If the meeting is called, we urge every Water 

 Users' Association to send delegates delegates 

 with power to act; with power to vote sufficient 

 money to make a real fight in the interests of the 

 settlers at Washington. 



Ogden, Utah, offered sometime ago to enter- 

 tain a convention of the National Federation. We 

 believe she is willing still to throw open her doors. 

 Ogden is centrally located for all the projects. The 

 place, therefore, is easily fixed. Now for the date 

 and the call for the meeting. 



Act settlers ! As one man, act ! Your interests 

 are common. 



Secretary of the Interior Lane has 

 Play the placed a ban of secrecy upon all de- 



Game cisions by the various project 



Fair, Boards of Review, which are in- 



Mr. Lane vestigating costs of Federal irriga- 



tion work. This ruling is wrong. 

 It smacks of the methods of the old Reclamation 

 Service bureaucracy, which Secretary Lane prom- 

 ised to destroy. 



The findings of these local boards should be 

 considered in the same manner as are the findings 

 of a United States district court. No lower court 

 record is kept secret until the Supreme Court has 

 passed finally upon a case. Court findings of facts 

 are made public, and these facts are permitted to 

 have their natural effect upon the public mind. 

 Should not this be the case as regards the findings 

 on the various projects? 



THE IRRIGATION AGE feels that it did a great 

 public duty in publishing in full the majority de- 

 cision of the Board of Review on the Carlsbad, 

 N. M., project in its June issue. It was a stinging 

 indictment of the Reclamation Service, but more 

 important, it was filled with a lot of law, facts and 

 suggestions that have proven of tremendous value 

 to settlers on other projects in presenting their 

 cases before their local boards. The Carlsbad de- 

 cision served to awaken the settlers on many proj- 

 ects, where Reclamation Service controlled boards 

 were artistically glossing over any defects, waste, 

 extravagance or excessive costs. 



Secretary Lane has had the full confidence of 

 the water users on the Federal projects. They 

 believed that he was striving honestly to better 

 their conditions. His new ruling shakes their faith 

 in him. Such acts tend to destroy confidence in 

 our government. 



You started this revaluation game, Mr. Lane. 

 Play the game. Play it in accordance with the rules 

 of the West and of all fair men. Play it with all 

 the cards above the table. 



Specialists of the Department of 

 Keep the Agriculture who have been making an 



Farmer's investigation into the use of land by 



Son on high schools in teaching agriculture 



the Farm and in the encouragement of boys to 



carry on supervised home projects, 

 make the following suggestions as to how the agri- 

 cultural instructor may help to solve the serious shift- 

 ing-tenant problem. 



It can safely be assumed that the average boy 

 leaves school at 18 years of age. From the best in- 

 formation available the average farmer does not start 

 farming on his own account until he is somewhere 

 between 25 and 30 years of age. In other words, 

 there is a period of the farmer's life, when he is be- 

 tween 18 and 30 years of age, when he is not working 

 on his own farm nor is he his own master. It would 

 seem that wherever the home-project method has been 

 introduced an effort should be made to follow up the 

 boy and, if possible, arrange in some way so that lie 

 continues his home-project work and gradually be- 

 comes a partner with his father in the farm business. 

 This feature should be a part of the extension work 

 of the agricultural instructor. 



Farmers are recruited from two sources, from 

 the sons of farmers and the sons of agricultural labor- 

 ers. In going over the original census schedules of 

 1910 for farmers of Iowa County, Wis., this rather in- 

 teresting fact developed that where the tenant and 

 landlord had the same surname the tenant had been 

 on the farm that he was on the day the census was 

 taken for a much longer period than where their sur- 

 names were different. It was found that 31 per cent 

 of the cash tenants who were related to the owner had 

 been tenants on the farms which they were on, at the 

 census date, for two years or less, while the per cent 

 for those where no relationship existed was 65. For 

 share tenants the figures were 50 and 80 per cent re- 

 spectively. In other words, where there is relationship 

 there is less of the shifting-tenant problem than where 

 relationship does not exist. From other records it was 

 learned that of the total years a man had been a ten- 

 ant, he had been a tenant on the farm where he was 

 at the time the records were taken 76 per cent of the 

 total time when kinship existed and 50 per cent when 

 there was no relationship. The returns also indicated 

 that where relationship existed 33 per cent had at- 

 tended high school, but where there was no relation- 

 ship only 18 per cent had attended high school. In 

 other words, if through the school the farmers could 

 be made to take an interest in the agricultural training 

 of the boy and they could be established in a partner- 

 ship relation, the shifting-tenant problem would be 

 partially solved. 



