362 HEARINGS BEFORE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE. 
The work in New Jersey was to determine how far irrigation could be 
used to aid the market gardener and in the irrigation of sandy lands. 
Mr. Scorr. Let me inquire whether any work of that kind had been 
done by private individuals in New Jersey at all before you under- 
took it. 
Mr. Meap. Yes, sir; some few market gardeners, I have found out 
since, have been ace there for twenty-five years; but it was not 
generally understood, and our work has certainly had the effect of 
extending its adoption by market gardeners, ina great measure. That 
has been the principal usefulness of our work in the East; and a canvass 
of the market gardeners in the vicinity of New York and Boston 
shows that irrigation is becoming now the rule and not the exception 
in all the progressive market garden districts. In Wisconsin our 
work is to help in putting the growing of cranberries on a satisfactory 
financial footing. For fifteen years they have been trying to grow 
cranberries in Wisconsin. They have the climate and the soil, and 
they have a great market for them; but the balance has been on the 
wrong side of the ledger most of the time. The trouble has been that 
they did not know when to put water on and when to take it off, and 
that is the vital issue with cranberries. It wants to be put on at the 
right time and taken off promptly at the right time, and that means a 
study of the size of ditches, the kind of ditches, preparation of fields, 
to enable that to be done. That is what we are doing in cooperation 
with the State experiment station of Wisconsin. 
In Missouri the question is just how far and in what way irrigation 
can be made use of in the Mississippi Valley, and the results of the irri- 
gation of small fruits and of nursery stock shows that it is going to be 
one of the features of their production in the future. I think that much 
has been determined; but there still remain questions of how to irri- 
gate in this eastern country. The question of whether you can do it 
best by a sprinkling or by volume is a thing about which the market 
gardeners are-all quarreling; and we hope to continue that line of work 
with the idea of betterment in future years. . 
We have been requested by the State experiment stations of New 
York and New Jersey to place in the eastern section of the country this 
year a man who understands irrigation, a skilled and experienced irri- 
gator, to study the conditions here and to advise them what his con- 
clusions are in regard to the field of irrigation in this part of the country. 
It depends on what the committee does whether we do it or not. I 
think the expenditure of a few hundred dollars for the services of a 
man in the summer is one of those things that could be made wisely, 
but it is a thing that we can easily drop. 
But I believe throughout the whole humid section of the United 
States, wherever intensive cultivation is adopted, irrigation is going 
to be employed as an insurance and asa means of increasing the yield. 
I believe irrigation is going to be used as it is in Europe as an adjunct 
of dairymen. The adoption of irrigation in Italy, where they have 
40 inches of rainfall, enables the farmers of that section to furnish the 
British army with the most of its cheese, and it has doubled the selling 
value of the land and trebled its production in the last twenty years. 
Mr. Scorr. Is that connection between irrigation and cheese made 
by means of the larger forage crop that can be grown by means of 
irrigation? 
