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XII.
IRRIGATION – MEANS AND ENDS

While few can have failed to realize the important part played by Water in the economy of vegetation, I judge that the question – "How can I secure to my growing plants a sufficiency of moisture at all times?" – has not always presented itself to the farmer's mind as demanding of him a practical solution. To rid his soil and keep it free of superfluous, but especially of stagnant water, he may or may not accept as a necessity; but that, having provided for draining away whatever is excessive, he should turn a short corner and begin at once to provide that water shall be supplied to his fields and plants whenever they may need it, he is often slow to apprehend. Yet this provision is but the counterpart and complement of the other.

I had sped across Europe to Venice, and noted with interest the admirable, effective irrigation of the great plain of Lombardy, before I could call any land my own. I saw there a region perhaps thirty miles wide by one hundred and fifty along the east bank of the Po, rising very gently thence to the foot of the Austrian Alps, which Providence seems to have specially adapted to be improved by irrigation. The torrents of melted snow which in Spring leap and foam adown the southern face of the Alps, bringing with them the finer particles of soil, are suddenly arrested and form lakes (Garda, Maggiore, Como, etc.) just as they emerge upon the plain. These lakes, slowly rising, often overflow their banks, with those of the small rivers that bear their waters westward to the Po; and this overflow was a natural source of abiding fertility. To dam these outlets, and thus control their currents, was a very simple and obvious device of long ago, and was probably begun by a very few individuals (if by more than one), whose success incited emulation, until the present extensive and costly system of irrigating dams and canals was gradually developed. When I traversed Lombardy in July, 1851, the beds of streams naturally as large as the Pemigewasset, Battenkill, Canada Creek, or Humboldt, were utterly dry; the water which would naturally have flowed therein being wholly transferred to an irrigating canal (or to canals) often two or three miles distant. The reservoirs thus created were filled in Spring, when the streams were fullest and their water richest, and gradually drawn upon throughout the later growing season to cover the carefully leveled and graded fields on either side to the depth of an inch or two at a time. If any failed to be soon absorbed by the soil, it was drawn off as here superfluous, and added to the current employed to moisten and fertilize the field next below it; and so field after field was refreshed and enriched, to the husbandman's satisfaction and profit. It may be that the rich glades of English Lancashire bear heavier average crops; but those of Lombardy are rarely excelled on the globe.

Why should not our Atlantic slope have its Lombardy? Utah, Nevada, and California, exhibit raw, crude suggestions of such a system; but why should the irrigation of the New World be confined to regions where it is indispensable, when that of the Old is not? I know no good reason whatever for leaving an American field unirrigated where water to flow it at will can be had at a moderate cost.

When I first bought land (in 1853) I fully purposed to provide for irrigating my nearly level acres at will, and I constructed two dams across my upland stream with that view; but they were so badly planned that they went off in the flood caused by a tremendous rain the next Spring; and, though I rebuilt one of them, I submitted to a miscalculation which provided for taking the water, by means of a syphon, out of the pond at the top and over the bank that rose fifteen or twenty feet above the surface of the water. Of course, air would work into the pipe after it had carried a stream unexceptionably for two or three days, and then the water would run no longer. Had I taken it from the bottom of the pond through my dam, it would have run forever, (or so long as there was water covering its inlet in the pond;) but bad engineering flung me; and I have never since had the heart (or the means) to revise and correct its errors.

My next attempt was on a much humbler scale, and I engineered it myself. Toward the north end of my farm, the hill-side which rises east of my lowland is broken by a swale or terrace, which gives me three or four acres of tolerably level upland, along the upper edge of which five or six springs, which never wholly fail, burst from the rocks above and unite to form a petty runnel, which dries up in very hot or dry weather, but which usually preserved a tiny stream to be lost in the swamp below. North of the gully cut down the lower hill-side by this streamlet, the hill-side of some three acres is quite steep, still partially wooded, and wholly devoted to pasturage. Making a petty dam across this runnel at the top of the lower acclivity, I turned the stream aside, so that it should henceforth run along the crest of this lower hill, falling off gradually so as to secure a free current, and losing its contents at intervals through variable depressions in its lower bank. Dam and artificial water-course together cost me $90, which was about twice what it should have been. That rude and petty contrivance has now been ten years in operation, and may have cost $5 per annum for oversight and repairs. Its effect has been to double the grass grown on the two acres it constantly irrigates, for which I paid $280, or more than thrice the cost of my irrigation. But more: my hill-side, while it was well grassed in Spring, always gave out directly after the first dry, or hot week; so that, when I most needed feed, it afforded none; its herbage being parched up and dead, and thus remaining till refreshed by generous rains. I judge, therefore, that my irrigation has more than doubled the product of those two acres, and that these are likely to lose nothing in yield or value so long as that petty irrigating ditch shall be maintained.

I know this is small business. But suppose each of the hundred thousand New-England farms, whereof five to ten acres might be thus irrigated at a cost not exceeding $100 per farm, had been similarly prepared to flow those acres last Spring and early Summer, with an average increase therefrom of barely one tun of Hay (or its equivalent in pasturage) per acre. The 500,000 tuns of Hay thus realized would have saved 200,000 head of cattle from being sent to the butcher while too thin for good beef, while every one of them was required for further use, and will have to be replaced at a heavy cost. Shall not these things be considered? Shall not all who can do so at moderate cost resolve to test on their own farms the advantages and benefits that may be secured by Irrigation?

XIII.
THE POSSIBILITIES OF IRRIGATION

I have given an account of my poor, little experiment in Irrigation, because it is one which almost every farmer can imitate and improve upon, however narrow his domain and slender his fortune. I presume there are Half a Million homesteads in the United States which have natural facilities for Irrigation at least equal to mine; many of them far greater. Along either slope of the Alleghenies, throughout a district at least a thousand miles long by three hundred wide, nearly every farm might be at least partially irrigated by means of a dam costing from twenty-five to one hundred dollars; so might at least half the farms in New-England and our own State. On the prairies, the plans must be different, and the expense probably greater, but the results obtained would bounteously reward the outlay. I shall not see the day, but there are those now living who will see it, when Artesian wells will be dug at points where many acres may be flowed from a gentle swell in the midst of a vast plain, or at the head of a fertile valley, expressly, or at least mainly, that its waters may be led across that plain, adown that valley, in irrigating streams and ditches, until they have been wholly drank up by the soil. I have seen single wells in California that might be made to irrigate sufficiently hundreds of acres, by the aid of a reservoir into which their waters could be discharged when the soil did not require them, and there retained until the thirsty earth demanded them.

An old and successful farmer in my neighborhood affirms that Water is the cheapest and best fertilizer ever applied to the soil. If this were understood to mean that no other is needed or can be profitably applied, it would be erroneous. Still, I think it clearly true that the annual product of most farms can be increased, and the danger of failure averted, more cheaply by the skillful application of water than by that of any other fertilizer whatever, Plaster (Gypsum) possibly excepted.

I took a run through Virginia last Summer, not far from the 1st of August. That State was then suffering intensely from drouth, as she continued to do for some weeks thereafter. I am quite sure that I saw on her thirsty plains and hillsides not less than three hundred thousand acres planted with Indian Corn, whereof the average product could not exceed ten bushels per acre, while most of it would fall far below that yield, and there were thousands of acres that would not produce one sound ear! Every one deplored the failure, correctly attributing it to the prevailing drouth. And yet, I passed hundreds if not thousands of places where a very moderate outlay would have sufficed to dam a stream or brooklet issuing from between two spurs of the Blue Ridge, or the Alleghenies, so that a refreshing current of the copious and fertilizing floods of Winter and Spring, warmed by the fervid suns of June and July, could have been led over broad fields lying below, so as to vanquish drouth and insure generous harvests. Nay; I feel confident that I could in many places have constructed rude works in a week, after that drouth began to be felt, that would have saved and made the Corn on at least a portion of the planted acres through which the now shrunken brooks danced and laughed idly down to the larger streams in the wider and equally thirsty valleys. Of course, I know that this would have been imperfect irrigation – a mere stop-gap – that the cold spring-water of a parched Summer cannot fertilize as the hill-wash of Winter and Spring, if thriftily garnered and warmed through and through for sultry weeks, would do; yet I believe that very many farmers might, even then, have secured partial crops by such irrigation as was still possible, had they, even at the eleventh hour, done their best to retrieve the errors of the past.

For the present, I would only counsel every farmer to give his land a careful scrutiny with a view to irrigation in the future. No one is obliged to do any faster than his means will justify; and yet it may be well to have a clear comprehension of all that may ultimately be done to profit, even though much of it must long remain unattempted. In many cases, a stream may be dammed for the power which it will afford for two or three months of each year, if it shall appear that this use is quite consistent with its employment to irrigation, when the former alone would not justify the requisite outlay. It is by thus making one expense subserve two quite independent but not inconsistent purposes that success is attained in other pursuits; and so it may be in farming.

As yet, each farmer must study his own resources with intent to make the most of them. If a manageable stream crosses or issues from his land, he must measure its fall thereon, study the lay of the land, and determine whether he can or cannot, at a tolerable cost, make that stream available in the irrigation of at least a portion of his growing crops when they shall need water and the skies decline to supply it. On many, I think on most, farms situated among hills, or upon the slopes of mountains, something may be done in this way – done at once, and with immediate profit. But this is rudimentary, partial, fragmentary, when compared with the irrigation which yet shall be. I am confident that there are points on the Carson, the Humboldt, the Weber, the South Platte, the Cache-le-Poudre, and many less noted streams which thrid the central plateau of our continent, where an expenditure of $10,000 to $50,000 may be judiciously made in a dam, locks and canals, for the purposes of irrigation and milling combined, with a moral certainty of realizing fifty per cent. annually on the outlay, with a steady increase in the value of the property. If my eye did not deceive me, there is one point on the Carson where a dam that need not cost $50,000 would irrigate one hundred square miles of rich plain which, when I saw it eleven years ago, grew nought but the worthless shrubs of the desert, simply because nothing else could endure the intense, abiding drouth of each Nevada Summer. Such palpable invitations to thrift cannot remain forever unimproved.

In regions like this, where Summer rains are the rule rather than the exception, the need of irrigation is not so palpable, since we do or may secure decent average crops in its absence. Yet there is no farm in our country that would not yield considerably more grain and more grass, more fruit and more vegetables, if its owner had water at command which he could apply at pleasure and to any extent he should deem requisite. Most men, thus empowered, would at first irrigate too often and too copiously; but experience would soon temper their zeal, and teach them

"The precious art of Not too much;"

and they would thenceforth be careful to give their soil drink yet, not drown it.

Whoever lives beyond the close of this century, and shall then traverse our prairie States, will see them whitened at intervals by the broad sails of windmills erected over wells, whence every gale or breeze will be employed in pumping water into the ponds or reservoirs so located that water may be drawn therefrom at will and diffused in gentle streamlets over the surrounding fields to invigorate and impel their growing crops. And, when all has been done that this paper faintly foreshadows, our people will have barely indicated, not by any means exhausted, the beneficent possibilities of irrigation.

The difficulty is in making a beginning. Too many farmers would fain conceal a poverty of thought behind an affectation of dislike or contempt for novelties. "Humbug!" is their stereotyped comment on every suggestion that they might wisely and profitably do something otherwise than as their grandfathers did. They assume that those respected ancestors did very well without Irrigation; wherefore, it cannot now be essential. But the circumstances have materially changed. The disappearance of the dense, high woods that formerly almost or quite surrounded each farm has given a sweep to the heated, parching winds of Summer, to which our ancestors were strangers. Our springs, our streams, do not hold out as they once did. Our Summer drouths are longer and fiercer. Even though our grandfathers did not, we do need and may profit by Irrigation.

XIV.
PLOWING – DEEP OR SHALLOW

Rules absolutely without exception are rare; and they who imagine that I insist on plowing all lands deeply are wrong for I hold that much land should never be plowed at all. In fact, I have seen in my life nearly as large an area that ought not as I have that ought to be plowed, by which I mean that half the land I have seen may serve mankind better if devoted to timber than if subjected to tillage. I personally know farmers who would thrive far better if they tilled but half the area they do, bestowing on this all the labor and fertilizers they spread over the whole, even though they threw the residue into common and left it there. I judge that a majority of our farmers could increase the recompense of their toil by cultivating fewer acres than they now do.

Nor do I deny that there are soils which it is not advisable to plow deeply. Prof. Mapes told me he had seen a tract in West Jersey whereof the soil was but eight inches deep, resting on a stratum of copperas (sulphate of iron,) which, being upturned by the plow and mingled with the soil, poisoned the crops planted thereon. And I saw, last Summer, on the intervale of New River, in the western part of Old Virginia, many acres of Corn which were thrifty and luxuriant in spite of shallow plowing and intense drouth, because the rich, black loam which had there been deposited by semi-annual inundations, until its depth ranged from two to twenty feet, was so inviting and permeable that the corn-roots ran below the bottom of the furrow about as readily as above that line. I do not doubt that there are many millions of acres of such land that would produce tolerably, and sometimes bounteously, though simply scratched over by a brush harrow and never plowed at all. In the infancy of our race, when there were few mouths to fill and when farming implements were very rude and ineffective, cultivation was all but confined to these facile strips and patches, so that the utility, the need, of deep tillage was not apparent. And yet, we know the crops often failed utterly in those days, plunging whole nations into the miseries of famine.

The primitive plow was a forked stick or tree-top, whereof one prong formed the coulter, the other and longer the beam; and he who first sharpened the coulter-prong with a stone hatchet was the Whitney or McCormick of his day. The plow in common use to-day in Spain or Turkey is an improvement on this, for it has an iron point; still, it is a miserable tool. When, at five years old, I first rode the horse which drew my father's plow in furrowing for or cultivating his corn, it had an iron coulter and an iron share; but it was mainly composed of wood. In the hard, rocky soil of New-Hampshire, as full of bowlders and pebbles as a Christmas pudding is of plums, plowing with such an implement was a sorry business at best. My father hitched eight oxen and a horse to his plow when he broke up pebbly green-sward, and found an acre of it a very long day's work. I hardly need add that subsoiling was out of the question, and that six inches was the average depth of his furrow.

I judge that the best Steel Plows now in use do twice the execution that his did with a like expenditure of power – that we can, with equal power, plow twelve inches as easily and rapidly as he plowed six. Ought we to do it? Will it pay?

I first farmed for myself in 1845 on a plat of eight acres, in what was then the open country skirting the East River nearly abreast the lower point of Blackwell's Island, near Fiftieth-st., on a little indentation of the shore known as Turtle Bay. None of the Avenues east of Third was then opened above Thirtieth-st.; and the neighborhood, though now perforated by streets and covered with houses, was as rural and secluded as heart could wish. One fine Spring morning, a neighbor called and offered to plow for $5 my acre of tillage not cut up by rows of box and other shrubs; and I told him to go ahead. I came home next evening, just as he was finishing the job, which I contemplated most ruefully. His plow was a pocket edition; his team a single horse; his furrows at most five inches deep. I paid him, but told him plainly that I would have preferred to give the money for nothing. He insisted that he had plowed for me as he plowed for others all around me. "I will tell you," I rejoined, "exactly how this will work. Throughout the Spring and early Summer, we shall have frequent rains and moderate heat: thus far, my crops will do well. But then will come hot weeks, with little or no rain; and they will dry up this shallow soil and every thing planted thereon."

The result signally justified my prediction. We had frequent rains and cloudy, mild weather, till the 1st of July, when the clouds vanished, the sun came out intensely hot, and we had scarcely a sprinkle till the 1st of September, by which time my Corn and Potatoes had about given up the ghost. Like the seed which fell on stony ground in the Parable of the Sower, that which I had planted had withered away "because there was no root;" and my prospect for a harvest was utterly blighted, where, with twelve inches of loose, fertile, well pulverized earth at their roots, my crops would have been at least respectable. When I became once more a farmer in a small way on my present place, I had not forgotten the lesson, and I tried to have plowed deeply and thoroughly so much land as I had plowed at all. My first Summer here (1853) was a very dry one, and crops failed in consequence around me and all over the country; yet mine were at least fair; and I was largely indebted for them to relatively deep plowing. I have since suffered from frost (on my low land), from the rotting of seed in the ground, from the ravages of insects, etc.; but never by drouth; and I am entirely confident that Deep Plowing has done me excellent service. My only trouble has been to get it done; for there are apt to be reasons? – (haste, lateness in the season, etc.) – for plowing shallowly for "just this time," with full intent to do henceforth better.

I close this paper with a statement made to me by an intelligent British farmer living at Maidstone, south of England. He said:

"A few years ago there came into my hands a field of twelve acres, which had been an orchard; but the trees were hopelessly in their dotage. They must be cut down; then their roots must be grubbed out; so I resolved to make a clean job of it, and give the field a thorough trenching. Choosing a time in Autumn or early Winter when labor was abundant and cheap, I had it turned over three spits (27 inches) deep; the lowest being merely reversed; the next reversed and placed at the top; the surface being reversed and placed below the second. The soil was strong and deep, as that of an orchard should be; I planted the field to Garden Peas, and my first picking was very abundant. About the time that peas usually begin to wither and die, the roots of mine struck the rich soil which had been the first stratum, but was now the second, and at once the stalks evinced a new life – threw out new blossoms, which were followed by pods; and so kept on blossoming and forming peas for weeks, until this first crop far more than paid the cost of trenching and cultivation."

Thus far my English friend. Who will this year try a patch of Peas on a plat made rich and mellow for a depth of at least two feet, and frequently moistened in Summer by some rude kind of irrigation?

The fierceness of our Summer suns, when not counteracted by frequent showers, shortens deplorably the productiveness of many Vegetables and Berries. Our Strawberries bear well, but too briefly; our Peas wither up and cease to blossom after they have been two or three weeks plump enough to pick. Our Raspberries, Blackberries, etc., fruit well, but are out of bearing too soon after they begin to yield their treasures. I am confident that this need not be. With a deep, rich soil, kept moistened by a periodical flow of water, there need not and should not be any such haste to give over blooming and bearing. The fruit is Nature's attestation of the geniality of the season, the richness and abundance of the elements inhering in the soil or supplied to it by the water. Double the supply of these, and sterility should be postponed to a far later day than that in which it is now inaugurated.