Manchester Democrat. [volume] (Manchester, Iowa) 1875-1930, 1901-07-17

Rice Growing In South West LOUISE
ana Safe Road To Fortune.
Dedicated to the Iowa Colony by $. L. Gary
President.
The safety of a crop is the largest
factor In success.
Very few of us as yet realize the
many safe guards that irrigation throws
around growing crops. Today one
half the growing crops are mensnced by
drouth. Irrigation is q safe remedy
The average loss annually reaches way.
up in the millions.
The loss by insects, bugs, worms and
grasshoppers reaches hundreds of mil
lions more.
We have the same safe remedy in
double irrigation.
Fires from prairies, from engines,
from any and allsources cause the loss
Of irIii0ns more. Water will save,
wherever you have the suitable eondi-
tions canals, wells and level clay soil.
Indeed the conditions are all met in the
rice belt.
Ordinarily people were satisfied with
. rainfall of sixty inches 1--WE feet1
each year and we'll they might be were
it evenly distributed. But that is sell
dom the case, for instance, May and
June have averaged little over six
inches each for thirty years, but this
year May gave 35-1OO of an inch and
June about one inch, or Q shortage Of
over ten inches. This loss might easily
ruin the growing crop.
The remedy is also found in artificial
irrigation.
Again experience has shown that
there is time in the life of every crop
when irrigation would double its yield.
Most of US have found that regularity
of production is very important fac
tor in success.
A small average crop assured each
year, like small monthly stipend oral
lowance is more desirable than "large
expectations" of uncertain gains.
Double irrigation gives double se-
curity for all growing crops and makes
the game Of making living at which
all have to play almost certainty.
Rice growing in Southwest Louisiana
has double irrigation natural and artf-
ficiaD.
The rainfall is rs well distributed as
in any other agricultural belt as evil
dencad by the fact that q general fail.
ure of crops has not happened in one
hundred years, and now one hundred
canals and five hundred irrigating wells
are battling successfully the worst
drouth in the history of the country,
and expect to save the most valuable
crop ever made. Irrigation is the best
fertilizer and adds fifty per cent. to the
value Of sure crop.
Anciently the renter paid SO 1-3percent
for water, today the canals charge 2Oper
cent, and the wells give water to the
owner at the actual cost; probably 10
per cent. of the crop. Prof. W. C..
Stubbs, In charge of Louisisns's
threeexperimental agricultural stations,
said recently that Southwestern Louis
lana had made more improvement and
more money the past five years than
any similar belt In the United States"
and he might have added that all this
has been brought around by the intro
duction of modern methods and ma
chinery with double irrigation into the
one crop-rice-by immigration from
the northwest, these people found the
hook or sickle the only harvester; the
walking beast-the thresher; the mortar
land pestle the common rice cleaner for
table use. Only short time ago, COM
paratively, the invention of lsborsaving
machinery, or any change in the estab-
lished order Of things was considered
sacrilege; even true liberty is of recent
date. The invention of labor saving
machinery is the child of labor. The
mother can not go back on her own
child; and we Of the nineteenth and
| twentieth centuries have found in those
things, said to belong to God, the most
valuable things in the lives Of men
The coal, the oil and gas hidden In the
bowels of the earth are the motive
power of commerce gold, silver and
copper the life of trade, steam and cleo.
tricity that move the world and carry
man This tradel and his thoughts to the
ends of the world. Most Of these and
many other things Of infinite value