The late J. M. Smith, Green Bay, Wisconsin, was one of the expert market gardeners of his region.  “The longer I live,” wrote Mr. Smith, then in the midst of a serious drought, “the more firmly am I convinced that plenty of manure and then the most complete system of cultivation make an almost complete protection against ordinary droughts.” (Same, page 330.)

If the soil is cultivated carefully and intensively, it will hold water within itself and carry a storage reservoir underneath the growing crop.  Finely pulverizing and packing the seed bed, makes it retain the greatest possible percentage of the moisture that falls, just as a tumbler full of fine sponge or of birdshot will retain many times the amount of water that a tumbler full of buckshot will.  The atmosphere quickly drinks up the moisture from the soil unless we Prevent it.  This we do by means of a soil “blanket,” called a “mulch” This finely pulverized surface largely prevents the moisture below from evaporating, and at the same time keeps the surface in such condition that it readily absorbs the dew and the showers.  Water moves in the soil as it does in a lamp wick, by capillary attraction; the more deeply and densely the soil is saturated with moisture, the more easily the water moves upward, just as oil “climbs up” a wet wick faster than it does a dry one.  One can illustrate the effect of this fine soil “mulch” in preventing evaporation by placing some powdered sugar on a lump of loaf sugar and putting the lump sugar in water.  The powdered sugar will remain dry even when the lump has become so thoroughly saturated that it crumbles to pieces.

“We have no useless American acres,” said Secretary Wilson.  “We shall make them all productive.  We have agricultural explorers in every far corner of the world; and they are finding crops which have become so acclimated to dry conditions, similar to our own West, that we shall in time have plants thriving upon our so-called arid lands.  We shall cover this arid area with plants of various sorts which will yield hundreds of millions of tons of additional forage and grains for Western flocks and herds.  Our farmers will grow these upon land now considered practically worthless.”

In this way it has been estimated that in the neighborhood of one hundred million acres of the American desert can be reclaimed to the most intensive agriculture. (See a study of the possible additions to available land in Prof.  W. S. Thompson’s “Population, a Study of Malthusianism”:  Col.  U, 1915.) Frederick V. Coville, the chief botanist of the Department of Agriculture, does not hesitate to say that in the strictly arid regions there are many millions of acres, now considered worthless for agriculture, which are as certain to be settled in small farms as were the lands of Illinois.

Land that was thought to be absolute desert has been made to yield heavy crops of grain and forage by this method without irrigation.