1 Sepr., 1901. ] QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. 289 
FIRST STEPS IN AGRICULTURE. 
FIRST STAGE. 
Sru Lesson. 
In our last lesson you were shown the necessity of getting rid of water 
which, owing to its quantity and stagnation, has an injurious effect on crops. 
But the farmer has another and often a more serious trouble to deal with, and 
that is a want of water. Those of you who live in the country know that when 
no rain falls for many months the crops languish and die, there is not enough 
grass in the bush or in the paddocks for the cattle, the waterholes dry up, the 
creeks stop running, and often the farmers have to go several miles for water. 
When the dry weather continues for many, many months, there occurs what is 
called a ‘“ drought,” and this drought is a very terrible calamity for the country, 
because almost every other industry depends upon the farming and pastoral 
industries. If there were no wheat crops, there would be no flour, and, there- 
fore, no bread. If maize, oats, and lucerne died out, it would not be possible 
to keep horses on the mines and in the towns. The men could not live without 
bread, and the horses would die without hay, corn, and chaff. Then 
the gold, copper, silver, and coal mines would not be worked, the trains could 
not run for want of coal, the stedimers would all be laid up, and 
the country would be in a dreadful state. No one could earn any 
money, and thousands of people would starve. So you see how necessary the 
farmers are to the world. They are indeed the most important of all people 
engaged in producing things for other’s use. But the farmer cannot produce 
anything without water in some shape. If it does not come in the shape of 
rain it must be got on to the land in some other way. ‘That way is called 
“irrigation” —that is, the application of water to the land to cause it to produce 
crops at once, or to enable it to produce crops by and by. There are several 
reasons why some lands should be irrigated. What are they, you say? Here 
are a few :— 
1. To increase the crops on which man and beasts depend for their sub- 
sistence. 
2. To supply the moisture which the want of rain has withheld. 
3. To supply the necessary extra moisture which certain plants require 
more than others. Swamp rice is a good example of such plants. 
4. To get earlier crops in consequence of the warmth supplied by the 
water on well-drained land. 
5. The water used in irrigation often contains a supply of valuable plant- 
food, which is useful as manure. 
There are other reasons for irrigating land, but these five are sufficient for 
you to know at this stage. 
In some countries thousands of pounds are spent on storing water and 
constructing watercourses to convey it to the land. In Egypt, India, Italy, 
America, and many other countries, the people have gone to great expense and 
labour to irrigate their farm lands. In Egypt £5,000,000 are now being spent 
to irrigate the lands on both banks of the Nile. The Dutch in South Africa 
always took care to bring water on to their farms before they did anything else. 
A people called the Mormons, a religious sect in North America, settled 
many years ago on the shores of the Salt Lake, in Utah, in the United States 
of America. Utah, or Salt Lake City, is a very beautiful place, surrounded 
with beautiful orchards and farms and gardens, and thousands of people live 
there. But when the Mormons reached the lake after a terrible journey across 
the prairies and mountains, they saw only a great salt lake with the shores 
glistening with white salt. There was no good grass, no good water. The 
place was a desert. But these brave people set to work and cut canals, and 
built dams and watercourses and brought the sweet water from the hills many 
miles away. ‘Then they planted fruit-tree seeds and vegetable seeds, and they 
