HEARINGS BEFORE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE. 3861 
pear ae Saath described by Judge Smith and Mr. Brooks, 
so as to illustrate to the farmer that it is practi 
vou Te P cable and would pay? 
Mr. Burueson. You can do it? 
Mr. Mean. Yes; and I think we ought to do it. I think that is one 
of the fields of work to which we ought to give considerable attention, 
because it is one of those emergency questions. Here is a country 
that is filling up with people, and the question of their staying there 
depends very largely on the adoption of a kind of agriculture suited 
to that country. 
Mr. Burveson. You are asking for an increase of $5,000? 
Mr. Mmap. Yes. 
Mr. Burteson. Will that be sufficient to carry on these experiments? 
Mr. Mean. Yes, sir. 
Mr. Burueson. If you get what you ask (the $5,000), that will 
enable you to carry on this system of experiments in the semiarid 
a fe 
yr. Mmap. Yes. 
Mr. Burueson. To show the farmer what can be done with small 
sources of water supply ? 
Mr. Mrap. Yes. This kind of agriculture is not limited to that par- 
ticular belt. As we come to understand the arid region better, we are 
finding out it is not a solid dry region. It is scattered throughout 
detached areas of land that have exactly those conditions where you 
can grow certain crops every year. You can grow all kinds of crops 
some years, and by the addition of a small quantity of water you can 
greatly increase the area that it will pay to cultivate without the 
adoption of complete irrigation. 
e have been doing work to promote that kind of development 
with, I think, great benefit to particular sections of the country in 
showing what can be done to conserve moisture in certain parts of 
Montana, Idaho, and Oregon. ; ; 
In Oregon we are carrying on precisely what we propose to carry on 
in Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma. There are about 3,000,000 acres of 
land in Oregon right on the border line between ability to grow crops 
without irrigation and certain failure in attempting to do it, and suc- 
cess is based entirely on this idea of making the best possible use of all 
the available water supply. It is nota question of crops; it is nota 
question of soil. It is a question of using the water that is available 
to make farming permanently profitable in that region; so that the 
experiments we propose to carry on will be carried on not alone in this 
district, although that will be the principal field, but we will carry 
them on also, as we did last year, in Oregon. We have carried them 
on for two years in Montana. 
When we come to the humid part of the country, we began several 
years ago in connection with the State experiment stations of New 
Jersey, Wisconsin, and Missouri to determine what was the field of 
profitable irrigation in the eastern part of the United States. Irriga- 
tion in Europe is not confined to the dry parts of Europe. They irri- 
gate in Germany, in Switzerland, in Italy—where the rainfall is greater 
than in any part of the Mississippi Valley—and it has been my belief 
from the first that as the population increases and we adopt more 
intensive cultivation irrigation will become more and more an impor- 
tant factor in agriculture in the eastern part of the United States. 
