JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH 
Von. XI Washington, D. C., November 5, 1917 No 6 
RUN-OFF FROM THE DRAINED PRAIRIE LANDS OF 
SOUTHERN LOUISIANA 
By Charges W. Okey, 
Senior Drainage Engineer , Office of Public Roads and Rural Engineering , United States 
Department of Agriculture 
INTRODUCTION 
While the draining of low-lying lands by means of pumps has long 
been practiced in parts of England and Holland, the application of this 
means of securing drainage for lands in the United States is a compara¬ 
tively recent development. A small amount of pumping of' drainage 
water had been done on a number of sugar plantations in southern Lou¬ 
isiana before the middle of the last century, but these pumping plants 
were crude affairs. About 1908 the work of reclaiming the Gulf coast 
marsh lands by means of drainage pumping was actively started. Grad¬ 
ually, modem machinery was introduced until by the end of 1915 about 
125,000 acres of land were under pump. Prior to the starting of this 
work there existed no very complete nor accurate data as regards the 
amount of water these plants would be called on to pump each year. 
Neither were there records as to what the maximum capacity of the 
plants should be. While there were available some more or less frag¬ 
mentary records of the operation of drainage pumping plants in Europe, 
the conditions of climate, rainfall, and soil in the United States are so 
different that European records were not considered to be of practical 
value. The capacities of the earlier pumping plants were based upon 
very rough approximations. They were more often too small than too 
large. The need for information on this subject soon became so apparent 
that in 1909 Drainage Investigations, Office of Experiment Stations, 
United States Department of Agriculture, undertook the task of collect¬ 
ing such data. The work was actually begun in the month of April, 
1909, by Messrs. W. B. Gregory and A. M. Shaw, who made the necessary 
measurements of the capacity of four drainage pumping plants and 
started a set of records of operation. Late in 1909 the work of carrying 
on these investigations was assigned to the writer and has been contin¬ 
ued under his charge to the present time. The work of rating the capacity 
Journal of Agricultural Research, 
Washington, D. C. 
kk 
(247) 
Vol. XI, No. 6 
Nov. s, 1917 
Key No. D—14 
