vast proportions of its vegetable seedgrowing industry. Almost as surprising as the magnitude of the business is the great variety of seeds of well known vegetables produced. One large seed farm produces seventyfour different varieties of lettuce seed and one hundred and twenty-five of sweet peas. Another contracted for delivery in the season of 1910 no less than thirty-five varieties of onion seed, thirtytwo of radish and thirty of aster. So it is throughout the list of popular vegetables and flowers. Each seedsman demands certain specialties that happen to be favored by his customers, and makes his contracts accordingly. Furthermore, each of the great seed growers is constantly striving to originate new and improved varieties-superior to the old in color, size, flavor, or some other particular. For this purpose men of special qualifications are employed; and these are always engaged in selecting, hybridizing and crossing numberless plants in the hope of producing something that shall be both new and meritorious. Some seeds are threshed by means of steam threshers, just as the farmers of the East and Middle West thresh out their wheat and oats; but other varieties must be flailed out with the primitive implement that modern machinery has entirely displaced for ordinary farm purposes. Lettuce is one of the most difficult of seed farm crops to handle, on account of the small size of the seeds and the great loss sure to result if allowed to get the least bit over-ripe before harvesting. The upper parts of the stalks, on which are the seed vessels, are cut off and carried to large squares or sacks of cloth. They are then conveyed to thirty-foot squares of canvas, upon which they are spread to cure. Two weeks are required for this, even in the daily sunshine of a California summer, the stalks being turned and stirred every day. The seed is then flailed out, cleaned by winnowing, sacked and stored for shipment, being sent to every civilized country in the world, and to some that hardly rank as civilized. Seed farmers have their troubles, like everyone else. One of the worst of the pests they have to contend with is the gopher. On the larger farms there are men who do nothing but trap and kill gophers and dispose of their dead bodies, for these destructive little rodents infest the seed farms by the tens of thousands, and the traps must be baited every day of the year. Poisoning is practiced to some extent, but trapping is found to be the surest way of holding the pest within bounds. The Santa Clara Valley is most widely renowned as America's greatest prune producing center; but it is evident that it has another claim to distinction. There is hardly a person in the country, who plants seeds at all, who has not sowed seeds grown somewhere in sight of the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton. MAKING WHEAT WITH THE BIG MUDDY By FLORENCE L. CLARK HAT of the Missouri, It is a unique scheme of making a half dozen kernels of wheat grow where one grew before-this scheme of pumping a river into the hilltops-but entirely tion and splendid steamers laden with wheat, wool and flaxseed lift anchor at the docks in Montana and the Dakotas for St. Louis and the Gulf? Shall it be allowed to continue willfully on as in the past, eating away the land, worming new channels in fertile counties and making a general nuisance of itself spoiling the map, or shall it be made to serve some useful end in the development of the empire it traverses? At Helena, Montana, they have answered the question by damming up the channel, thereby transforming the river's current energy into factory power. In North Dakota they are making ready to convert the "Big Muddy" into a utility worth many millions to the state. There, today on the banks of the Missouri pumps big and little are a-chug chugging. Ask what these pumps are so busy about and you will be told they are lifting water from the river up the hillsides to wheat fields fifty to seventyfive feet higher up. due to the immense quantities of lignite coal. The lignite provides first class motive power for the pump handles. It abounds along the entire course of the river through the state, usually on government land. So it is both accessible and cheap. The mere cost of digging ordinarily represents the price of it. By a fortunate provision of Nature many acres of rich bench land lie in North Dakota just back from the Missouri with its idle waters and omnipresent coal beds. These areas are level in extent and well adapted to irrigation. During the last few years, homesteaders have taken up some of this bench land and have experimented in a crude way with raising water from the river to their claims. Small centrifugal pumps and threshing engines have been used. With lignite serving as fuel for the engines, the homesteaders have succeeded in generating sufficient power to water land at quite an elevation. Their success suggested to the gov A SETTLING BASIN ON THE WILLISTON PROJECT, NORTH DAKOTA. FILLING WITH WATER. ernment the practicability of irrigating large tracts in similar fashion. As a consequence, the Reclamation Service now has a number of such pumping projects in North Dakota. Two are already in operation in the northwestern part of the state, at Williston and Buford. The area under the ditch on these two projects is not large-only about 25,000 acres. They for that reason might be considered of small importance if it were not that, in building them, the government has evolved a new plan of irrigation which insures the reclamation of many times 25,000 acres. By virtue of this plan, the government acts in the capacity of miner as well as engineer and farmer. A ten foot coal vein located on government land near the town of Williston is worked and coal carried from it on a narrow gauge railway to a power plant near by. Here, the lignite is converted into electrical power and then transmitted to the two pumping stations at Williston and Buford. These pumping stations are most ingenious. It was not practicable on account of the ever-changing course of the river, to erect pumping stations on shore. A unique substitute was contrived. Barges with the pumps on board were set afloat on the river. In order that the barges might accommodate A HARVEST OF WINTER RYE, MADE POSSIBLE BY THE WATERS OF THE BIG MUDDY. A VAT FOR SETTLING THE WATERS OF THE MISSOURI BEFORE TURNING THEM INTO THE WHEAT FIELDS. themselves to changes in the water level, they are connected with the banks by pipes fitted together with flexible joints. Through these pipes the pumps force the water of the river into settling vats on shore. Here they drop their silt previous to being turned into the main irrigation canal. From the main canal the water is raised by a succession of pumping lifts into higher lines of canals. The plant has been operated to its full capacity the past season with the best of results. While drought has blighted the dry land round about, ⚫ splendid crops of all kinds have been raised on the project. Because of the success of the WillistonBuford project, the government now has under consideration the irrigation of bench land in a similar manner at several other places on the river. Wherever coal is present and the bench land is of sufficient size, such irrigation will be practicable. The United States Geological Survey reports that a number of such tracts exist on the tributaries of the Missouri as well IRRIGATING POTATOES ON THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM. clause in the Reclamation Act provides that fifty-one per cent of all moneys derived from the sale of government land in the Western states shall be expended in the state from which it is derived in the reclamation of arid or semi-arid land. The Williston-Buford project has used up less than a million of the enormous sum which North Dakota has contributed and will contribute. Hence the early completion of other pumping projects in the Missouri Valley seems assured. Settlers also will be encouraged by the government to install private pumping plants where the bench land lies in too limited tracts for government service. It is expected that most of this irrigated land ultimately will be devoted to intensified farming-forty acres constituting a farm unit, and sugar beets, alfalfa, potatoes and other vegetables and small fruits becoming standard crops. Dairying will grow to be an important part of this diversified farming. At the State Experiment Station, operated on the Williston project, sugar beets, equal in percentage of sugar content to any grown in the United States have been raised this year. Three crops of alfalfa have been cut. Forty bushels of wheat per acre have been raised and potatoes and other vegetables have yielded wonderfully well. Paying crops of small grains can be grown ordinarily in western North Dakota without irrigation. Last year when State Commissioner of Agriculture, W. C. Gilbreath, journed down. from Bismarck to the Illinois State Fair with the exhibit of North Dakota grains which won the "Blue Ribbon" over eighteen other state exhibits, it was noted that not a few of the entries of the successful exhibit had been grown west of the Missouri. Irrigation in western North Dakota, unlike irrigation on the government projects farther west, is not a necessity. Farmers can prosper without it. It does, however, insure a big increase in yield per acre and "no failure." failure." Further than that it renders possible the raising of a great variety of crops which can not be grown on dry land. Best of all it opens the way for ten families to live where one now lives, and the addition of many thousands of tons of food products to the nation's supply. |