FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
59 
ten times as much per acre for his irriga¬ 
tion as the orchardist in the West. This 
is due to several interesting causes. The 
State of Florida has a soil that will not 
support water in ditches as Western soils 
will. Neither will it respond to the cheap¬ 
er methods of irrigation in all cases be¬ 
cause of its natural character. 
I have found in many places that poor¬ 
ly designed systems have been placed and 
sad engineering mistakes made, compell¬ 
ing the farmer to pay for more expensive 
material than was necessary to obtain the 
results he wished. 
The work the United States Depart¬ 
ment of Agriculture wishes to do in your 
State is to make a fair comparison of the 
methods we find being used in Florida 
with the methods we find being used in 
the West and adapt the cheaper methods 
as far as possible, and modify the expen¬ 
sive methods when practicable. 
New implements for laying out and 
building ditches and cheaper water con¬ 
duits must be worked out, and laborers 
taught how to run water. It has been a 
great disappointment to many people who 
have made trips through the West and 
seen water running peacefully and smooth¬ 
ly over the surface to find that they are un¬ 
able to control water and get an even dis¬ 
tribution when trying the same methods 
in Florida. 
We feel that by co-operative work with 
your State Experimental Station and 
with individual farmers we can help you 
solve the irrigation problem! in Florida in 
a more economical way. As time goes on 
we will have more definite data to give 
you and hope to meet you with some 
pleasing results in the future. 
Mr. Member—What do vou think 
j 
of the overhead system as used in this 
State ? 
Mr. Williams—The system of over¬ 
head irrigation for citrus trees seems to 
us to be impracticable, although we are 
not prepared to condemn any system now 
being used in your state. It certainly 
seems as though there would be oppor¬ 
tunity for heavy evaporation losses and 
that there are better ways of irrigating 
than by throwing the water into the air 
and letting it come down in a large area 
on trees and earth. 
Mr. Van Dormer—How about irrigat¬ 
ing vegetables ? 
M,r. Williams—I think the people who 
are familiar with the growing of vege¬ 
tables in your State can tell you many ad¬ 
vantages in spray irrigation for vegeta¬ 
bles. However, I believe there is room 
for comparison with cheaper methods in 
many vegetable fields and 1 that more 
economical and simpler methods of appli¬ 
cation will be used after the comparison. 
Mr. Van Dormer—In our sandy soil 
there seems to be a hindrance to the ap¬ 
plication of water by letting it run on the 
surface. It will run into the soil so fast 
that it makes very little headway in the 
trench and one end of the trench will be 
soaking and the water not yet to the 
other end. 
Mr. Williams—Where the conditions 
are of that nature and it becomes abso¬ 
lutely impossible to supply water on the 
surface then you must resort to more ex¬ 
pensive methods. 
Prof. Rolfs—How far were you able 
to run water in the ditches that you made 
in the preliminary experiments? 
Mr. Williams—In our experiments we 
have not been able to obtain the head of 
