GROWING BY IRRIGATION. 279 
Irrigation is the modern miracle of the West and 
Southwest. It has built railways and towns and 
cities and states. And the first thing to follow the 
irrigator’s shovel is the alfalfa plant. 
Alfalfa Loves Desert Soils Alfalfa loves new 
desert soils. They are not always fertile to the 
touch of wheat or maize or potatoes. Sometimes 
indeed they spurn such things and the poor settler 
would be in sorry plight were it not for alfalfa. 
Nearly all desert soils love alfalfa. After it has 
grown for a time, then will grow grain or beets or 
vines or orchards or any other good things. 
The only desert soils that refuse to grow alfalfa 
are those that have in them too much of a good 
thing, too much alkali—that is, too much of sulphate 
of soda, carbonate of soda and other salts. Even 
these soils can be brought into alfalfa by right man- 
agement. Drainage with tiles laid deep under the 
ground will drain off the excess of alkahes; some- 
times they can be freed of injurious excess by flood- 
ing over the surface and dissolving and washing 
away the excess of alkalies that have risen to the 
surface by the evaporation of the soil water. 
It is simply marvelous what desert land will do 
after alfalfa has grown on it. The writer has seen 
potatoes grown after alfalfa in the valleys of Utah 
yielding as much as 1,000 bushels per acre. Wheat 
on alfalfa sod in the San Luis valley of Colorado 
has yielded more than 100 bushels per acre. 
Alfalfa in Arid Agriculture—Alfalfa is the 
foundation stone of all the agriculture of the arid 
