A Walk from London to John OGroats | Page 7

a constant volume of air is propelled with such force as to set the whole boiling and foaming like a little cataract. One man at the engine and two at the hose in the distant field perform the whole operation. The chapped and "baky" surface of the farm is thus softened and enriched at will, and rendered productive.
Now, this operation seems to constitute the present distinctive speciality of Alderman Mechi's Tiptree Farm. Will it pay? ask a thousand voices. In how many years will he get his money back? Give us the balance sheet of the experiment. A New Englander, favorably impressed with the process, would be likely to answer these questions by another, and ask, will drainage pay? Not in one year, assuredly, nor in five; not in ten, perhaps. The British Government assumes that all the expenditure upon under-drainage will be paid back in fifteen or twenty years at the farthest. It lends money to the land-owner on this basis; and the land-owner stipulates with his tenant that he shall reimburse him by annual instalments of six or seven per cent. until the whole cost of the operation is liquidated. Thus the tenant-farmer is willing to pay six, sometimes seven per cent. annually, for twenty years, for the increased capacity of production which drainage gives to the farm he cultivates. At the end of that period the Government is paid by the landlord, and the landlord by the tenant, and the tenant by his augmented crops for the whole original outlay upon the land. For aught either of the three parties to the operation knows to the contrary, it must all be done over again at the end of twenty years. The system is too young yet, even in England, for any one to say how long a course of tubing will last, or how often it must be relaid.
One point, therefore, has been gained. No intelligent English farmer, who has tried the system, now asks if under-drainage will pay; nor does he expect that it will pay back the whole expenditure in less than twelve or fifteen years. Here is a generous faith in the operation on the side of all the parties concerned. Then why should not Alderman Mechi's irrigation system be put on the same footing, in the matter of public confidence? It is nothing very uncommon even for a two-hundred-acre farmer in England to have a small stationary or locomotive steam-engine, and to find plenty of work for it, too, in threshing his grain, grinding his fodder, pulping his roots, cutting his hay and straw, and for other purposes. Mr. Mechi would doubtless have one for these objects alone. So its cost must not be charged to the account of irrigation. A single course of iron tubing, a third of a mile long, reaching to the centre of his farthest field, cannot cost more, with all the hose employed, than the drainage of that field, while it would be fair to assume that the iron pipes will last twice as long as those of burnt clay. They might fairly be expected to hold good for forty years. If, then, for this period, or less, the process yields ten per cent. of increased production annually, over and above the effect of all other means employed, it is quite evident that it will pay as well as drainage.
But does it augment the yearly production of the farm by this amount? To say that it is the only process by which the baky and chappy soil of Tiptree can be thoroughly fertilised, would not suffice to prove its necessity or value to other soils of different composition. One fact, however, may be sufficient to determine its virtue. The fields of clover, and Italian rye-grass, etc., are mown three and even four times in one season, and afterwards fed with sheep. Certainly, no other system could produce all this cropping. The distinctive difference it makes in other crops cannot, perhaps, be made so palpable. The wheat looked strong and heavy, with a fair promise of forty-five bushels to an acre. The oats, beans, and roots showed equally well.
The irrigation and deep tillage systems were going on simultaneously in the same field, affording me a good opportunity of seeing the operation of both. Two men were plying the hose upon a portion of the field which had already been mowed three times. Two teams were at work turning up the other, which had already been cropped once or twice. One of two horses went first, and, with a common English plough, turned an ordinary furrow. Then the other followed, of twice the force of the first, in the same furrow, with a subsoil plough held to the work beam-deep. The iron-stones and ferruginous clods turned up by this "deep