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Show IRRIGATION AND DRY FARMS Public Entitled to Some Sound In-formation In-formation Along Definite Lines Farmer's Experience. The large amount of space in newspapers news-papers and periodicals being devoted to farming shows that many of our strongest farm enthusiasts are not farmers. Now that public opinion has been focused on the subject, the public pub-lic should get some sound information along definite lines, because this , flowery tommyrot about farming that some editors are handing out will do J. but little good and tends to disgust . IV. those who do know something on the JT subject, writes Ivan Mattson in the " Farm and Fireside. Last year there were some 14,000,-000 14,000,-000 acres under irrigation In our country, coun-try, and there was water enough for 6,000,000 acres more. The government govern-ment and private companies have already al-ready projects under way that will bring our irrigated acreage over the 30,000,000-acre mark within ten 'years. Already the projects are being opened up faster than the land can be taken care of. Our Irrigated area will far exceed even the above figures, because be-cause many minor projects, that are not yet planned, will be planned and executed within the ten years. Opening up irrigated land is even a more difficult problem than opening up a dry farm. The land must be cleared, broken and leveled, and it is : a hard task for a regular farmer to accomplish, to say nothing of a city man. I had personal experience along m that line last summer. The land on ..J the farm where I worked lay in about ' , as fine a condition as a piece of raw land ever did, yet to get this land broken and get the ground ready for a crop and for irrigation cost about seven dollars per acre. The first season's sea-son's crop Is not a full crop, because the water cannot be evenly distributed; distrib-uted; the cost of irrigating the first season is heavy, because the water must be watched constantly, dikes must be shoveled up here and there and a raise shoveled through in other places. The first settlers in irrigated communities com-munities undergo many hardships, and the weeding out of the discouraged, the incompetent and poor is even severer se-verer than in any dry-farming community. com-munity. The first few years on a new irrigated farm is the time that taxes a man's patience, endurance, ingenuity and bank-account. Considering that the area of irrigated irri-gated farms, per farm, is decreasing (which means that more farmers are needed on the land already under irrigation irri-gation and that the opening up of new Irrigated land will demand a half- J million more farmers), it becomes at ' once apparent that it is no small matter mat-ter to get the man to the land after the water gets there. The "land shows" and real estate companies do much toward getting people to the land, but their methods ' result in .innumerable failures. Jt seems to me to be an insult to modern science to say that the present pres-ent methods of securing settlers for irrigated land is good enough. . . Considering the fact that irrigation In its modern aspect is a scence and that the opening up of new Irrigated farmg is in itself an engineering feat, it seems wise (to me at least) to draw the attention of young men to the subject, especially students in agricultural agri-cultural colleges. The increase of population in the irrigated districts cannot swing the job, because there are not enough of them. . It takes all the best men to fill positions at the " Intermountaln agricultural colleges, and not a few of the irrigation engineers en-gineers go away to engineer vast prelects pre-lects in Mexico, South America, India and elsewhere. |