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Show FUTURE OF IRRIGATION Subject Not Given Attention It Really Deserves. Special Study Necessary to Ascertain Right and Wrong Way to Irrigate Irri-gate Returns to Farmers Increased 600 Per Cent. (By L. M. WINSOR. Utah Agricultural College.) In this age of specialization the man who attempts to launch out in several directions is bound to fail sooner or later. He who sets out to do one thing, and does it well, is the man who succeeds. This is true not only in business and professional work, but on the farm as well. The successful farmer is the one who devotes de-votes himself to the particular line of agriculture for which he finds himself him-self adapted. There is one subject which has not been divided as it should have been, because of the lack of attention which it has secured, -and that is the subject of irrigation. Degrees are slill offered in irrigation engineering, which includes in-cludes the entire subject of both the dam and canal construction, technique and the application of water to the soil and the drainage of the water from the soil. In every case there is a right and a wrong way to irrigate, and a right and a wrong time to apply the water, and to know which is the right requires special study just the same as does the knowledge of how to produce a 1,200-pound beef from a grade Here ford steer. In fact, the mastering of the irrigation art is a great deal more difficult than most subjects, because so little thought has been given to irrigation, and so little of real moment has been written about it. However, this may be, we need not sit idly by and make no move to work out better methods of handling our irrigation water, wa-ter, just because there is no one to show us just what to do in every case. That is all the greater reason why we should set to and attack the problem for ourselves. The men who get a thorough knowledge of this question today are going to be the teachers of tomorrow. To convince ourselves of the importance impor-tance irrigation plays in our agriculture agricul-ture we have only to consider what our farms are without it. The arid farm Is limited practically to the growing of wheat, while the same farm by the aid of irrigation has unlimited possibilities. An arid farmer does exceptionally ex-ceptionally well if he clears ten dollars per acre, while the irrigation farmer with an ordinary crop of oats can clear sixty dollars an acre on the same kind of soil. The increase, then, of 600 per cent, is due not to the farmer nor to the soil, but to the irrigation water, thus making the water five times as valuable as the soil. And with the more intensive farming thus made possible, the returns due to the water sometimes reach fifty times the returns from an equal area of arid land. If the water is so valuable, why is it that so little attention is paid to its measurement and distribution? When a piece of land changes hands, the buyer never thinks of accepting it without first having it carefully surveyed sur-veyed and an abstract made of it yet he is willing to accept the water for that land just as it comes, or just as the water master, if there be one, sees fit to give it to him. Many times he Is not satisfied, and still he takes no steps toward the correction of this condition. |