Excerpt from Irrigation and Drainage Investigations of the Office of Experiment Stations, U. S. Department of Agriculture

The rainfall over one-third. Of the United States is so scanty that irrigation is a necessity to the profitable growth of agricultural crops. In other sections of the country there is an area equal in size to all New England, with Indiana added, which is so wet that crops can not be grown at all, and where settlement and cultivation must be post poned until the land has been diked and drained.

In the fifteen States and Territories of the arid region irrigation is the fundamental agricultural problem, because the very existence of civilized life depends in large measure on the ability to use rivers for this purpose. In these States the production of a cheap and abundant home food supply, made possible by irrigation, ' has increased the comfort and lessened the cost of living, and contributed in a greater degree than any other single cause to their continued growth and prosperity. By it desert wastes have been transformed into the most productive, healthful, and beautiful habitations of man to be found on this continent. The cities of Denver, Salt Lake, Los Angeles, and many others of lesser note are as much the creation of irrigation as the orchards and farms which surround them, and all depend for existence upon water and the institutions which govern its ownership and use.

In many humid sections of the country high-priced land and intensive methods of cultivation are making of irrigation a factor of continually increasing value and importance, and it would seem that the experience of the United States, like that of Europe, will prove that no agent of agriculture or horticulture is so effective in increasing and insuring large yields as the ability to apply water in the right amount and at the right time.

There are large areas of land which always receive too much water, large areas which never receive enough, and yet larger areas Which have sometimes too much and sometimes too little water. Only by proper control of the water supply can these lands be made to produce the best crops, and such a control includes both irrigation and drain age, some lands needing one, some the other, and some needing both. The greater part of the land now farmed in the United States belongs to the last class. The experiments made by this Office and the expe risnes of farmers and gardeners show that irrigation in dry years, even in the regions of heaviest average rainfall, much more than repays the cost of supplying the water. In these regions crops are as often drowned out as burned out, and it is probable that drainage to remove water in wet years will prove as profitable as irrigation in dry years.

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