The ten-mile wide wasteway could be extended north from the mouth of Red River to the bluffs at Helena. Then from Helena south the entire Mississippi Valley would be protected against danger from floods in the Mississippi River in the extraordinary flood years which may come only once in a generation, and yet may come in any two consecutive years as they did in 1912 and 1913. If this ten-mile wide wasteway, with its auxiliary flood water channel paralleling it, between it and the river, were constructed from Helena to the mouth of the Red River, and thence to the Gulf of Mexico, and in turn supplemented by source stream control of the floods of the Ohio, the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers, the lowlands of the Mississippi Valley could be made as safe from overflow or damage by devastating floods as the highlands of the Hudson River or the dry plains of eastern Colorado. The entire area of the Mississippi River Valley now subject to overflow is about 29,000 square miles. This is an area one-third larger than the entire cultivated area of the Empire of Japan, which sustains a farming population of 30,000,000 people. The lands of the Mississippi River Valley are infinitely richer and of greater natural fertility than the farming lands of Japan. Every acre of the rich sedimentary soil of the Delta of the Mississippi River would, if intensively cultivated, produce food enough to feed a family of five, with a large surplus over for distribution to the world's food markets. The entire 1,000,000 acres to be acquired by the national government in Louisiana should be immediately acquired within the area bounded on the south by the great embankment along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico and on the west by the great wasteway and auxiliary flood channel to be built from the mouth of Red River to Atchafalaya Bay and on the north and east by the Mississippi River.