Irrigation in the United States; A Discussion of Its Legal Economic and Financial Aspects (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V CROPS The fundamental and final test of all agricultural effort is the relation between cost and returns, and this in turn is based on the crops grown. Irrigation, applied to agriculture, is merely one factor in crop production. Moisture is necessary to the growth of plants, and if it is not supplied in sufficient quantity by nature, the deficiency can be supplied by man. In sections of what is termed the arid region this deficiency is so great that the production of any agricultural crops is impossible without irrigation; in other sections some crops can be produced without it, but their growth is uncertain and stunted, and the range of crops is very limited; while in other sections many crops can be grown with reasonable success without irrigation, and the supplying of water artificially becomes merely an insurance againstdrought or a means of producing larger or better crops than could be grown otherwise. The practice of irrigation, therefore, according to the climate, ranges all the way from an absolute necessity, without which agriculture cannot exist, to a mere means of improvement, like thorough cultivation, fertilization, or crop rotation. In every case, however, the real question is whether the crop returns which are obtained as a result of irrigation are sufficient to justify the expense of providing a water supply in addition to the other expenses of crop production. It will be seen that this is a complicated question, and the answer depends upon a large number of factors?the kind of crops grown, the yields and prices obtained, the cost of land, equipment, seed, and labor, as well as the cost of water. Too often the literature on this subject, especially the advertising literature, deals with the question as if it were a question of yields and cost of wate...