The Country-Life Movement in the United StatesBailey, L. H. (Liberty Hyde)
History
The Country-Life Movement in the United States
Bailey, L. H. (Liberty Hyde)
Country life
There remain, however, other lands to be reclaimed by other means. There
is much more land to be reclaimed by the removal of water than by the
addition of water. There are many more acres to be adapted to productive
uses by forest planting and conservation than by irrigation. There are
vastly larger areas waiting reclamation by the so-called "dry-farming"
(that is, by moisture-saving farming completely adapted to dry regions).
And all the land in all the states must be reclaimed by better farming.
I am making these statements in no disparagement of irrigation, but in
order to indicate the relation of irrigation to what should be a
recognized national reclamation movement.
_Supplemental irrigation._
Let me say further that irrigation is properly not a practice of arid
countries alone. Irrigation is for two purposes: to reclaim land and
make it usable; to mitigate the drought in rainfall regions. As yet the
popular imagination runs only to reclamation-irrigation. This form of
irrigation is properly regulated by the federal government.
Now and then a forehanded farmer in the humid region, growing high-class
crops, installs an irrigation plant to carry him through the dry spells.
As our agriculture becomes more developed, we shall greatly extend this
practice. We shall find that even in humid countries we cannot afford to
lose the rainfall from hills and in floods, and we shall hold at least
some of it against the time of drought as well as for cities and for
power. We have not yet learned how to irrigate in humid regions, but we
certainly shall apply water as well as manures to supplement the usual
agricultural practices.
We must learn to reckon with drought as completely as we reckon with
winter or with lessening productiveness. We probably lose far more from
dry spells than from all the bugs and pests.
_We need reserves._
But even though we should recognize a national reclamation movement to
include all these phases and others, it may not be necessary or
advisable in the interest of all the people, that every last acre in the
national domain be opened for exploitation or settlement in this decade
or even in this century. The nation may well have untouched reserves. No
one knows what our necessities will be a hundred years hence. Land that
has never been despoiled will be immeasurably more valuable to society
then than now; and society holds the larger interest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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