OCR Text |
Show PROFITABLE DRAINING. Near Chester, N. Y., is a morass which some years since was a miserable swamp, but which is now being gradually reclaimed under a system of drainage. Twenty years ago, so the New York Times asserts, a farmer conceived the notion of draining a portion and making it tillable soil. He took sixty acres and ditched it, and when it was found that the draining left as a soil the finest of black muck, the price advanced from $4 to $17 per acre. The great value of the land is owing to its adaptability to onions. The price continued to rise until as high as $1,000 per acre has been paid for the reclaimed lands. A crop of 800 bushels of onions to the acre is not uncommon, and the Greycourt onion meadows are celebrated throughout the country. About 300 acres are under cultivation this year, and the success of the onion business in the meadows has led to the reclaiming of similar lands in other parts of the county, until it is believed that the onion crop of Orange County will amount to 300,000 bushels this year. The average price received by onion farmers is $1 per bushel. The average yield is about 300 bushels to the acre. The crop is almost invariably sold for cash as soon as it is ready for market, and as it matures early in the season the farmer is allowed abundant time to keep his land in the condition necessary to its productiveness. This great success in draining wet lands ought to lead to more efforts throughout the country to reclaim rich lands now soaking through the ignorance and neglect of farmers. Every little while a body of men, disgusted with the small returns from Eastern farming, will migrate West where land is cheap. We are inclined to think that $1 per acre is cheap enough, especially when lying near a market, and a very little added expense, mostly at the command of a man who can dig ditches, will, when judiciously applied, raise the value of the land several hundred per cent. And we would like here to make a practical suggestion to any man who finds difficulty in getting the water to run off from a hill-bounded swamp. It is a fact, occasionally utilized by plumbers, that if a pipe be driven into a gravel soil, the point perhaps perforated with holes to keep out the stones, water can be poured into the pipe ad libitum, and it will all run off. This makes a very fine drain for waste water. The same idea can be utilized in certain swamps. Take a clay swamp in a sunken valley with no natural water-shed, and dig a cistern, say six feet in diameter and two or three feet deep. In the bottom of this sink several tubes, using ordinary 1 ½ inch gas pipe. Under the clay there is usually sand or gravel, and the water from the cisterns will flow through these pipes into the earth. A Maine farmer, some years since, built several cisterns in a swamp as described, and by digging drains to them in various directions succeeded in leading all the standing water into the earth, and converting a swamp hole into a productive farm.-Examiner and Chronicle. |