500 ALPALFA FARMING IN AMERICA. 
deficient in humus and nitrogen. I hoped that al- 
falfa might grow upon it. As an indication, our 
manager, G. P. Blair, had established a few acres 
on a rich old horse pasture. This looked fairly good. 
Personally I felt that with so much lime in the soil, 
and also phosphorus and potash, it ought not to be 
very difficult of restoration. 
We began the work by opening the old drainage 
-eanals. We were 80 feet above the Gulf of Mexico 
and hundreds of miles distant. This shows how flat 
our land was. It was fascinating work opening the 
old canals, some of them antedating the war and ayp- 
parently not cleaned since then. With the water off 
the land, we started the plows. The soil was very 
clammy and dead. It is a soil type difficult to man- 
age. It is usually plowed with water in the fur- 
rows, and in fact is hard to plow at any other time. 
We planted corn the first year, with soy beans and 
cowpeas also. The thin furrow slices turned up 
wet bake into brick, but the first shower loosens 
them and crumbles them into ‘‘buekshot,’’ hence the 
name of buckshot soil. Our corn, even with nitrate 
of soda fed to it, was far from good. Perhaps it 
made 20 bushels to the acre. We needed drain tiles 
and in fact we laid a few strings of them, with good 
results, but there was neither time nor money for 
much underdrainage. The Scots had not much faith 
and no desire to put much money into the demon- 
stration farm. 
Despairing of tiles I turned to surface drainage. 
If we could throw up the land in beds 2 rods wide 
