Douglas Island news., 1912-10-09
Farming in Interior Alaska

| Farming in Interior Alaska
 R. H. Stretch, who for many years has knocked about Alaska, and during the past few seasons has been engaged as statistician for the Copper River and Northwestern railroad, has written the following interesting article on the pos. abilities of this territory for agricul- tural pursuits. Our readers will of course understand that the frozen con- dition of the sub-soil does not exist in Southeastern Alaska:
 Successful farming in Alaska, as elsewhere, requires only three things fertile soil from two to five feet deep; season long enough to mature the crop, and immunity from drought, and any idea that these things cannot be found in Alaska, on account of the frozen condition of the sub-soil is a source of large amount of the ad- verse criticism of the possibilities of farming in the far north, socaIled. "As matter oe fact, this frozen con- dition of the sub soil is the reason of the luxuriant growth of plant life in Alaska, absurd as the proposition may seem to those who have not been accus- toned to call upon nature for the why and wherefore of her action. "Every farm in the United States. whatever the depth of the available surface may be, is underlaid with una vaiIabIe rock, hard pan, gravel or sand, into which more or less of the annual rainfall percolates, and is lost so far as value to the farmer is concerned, carrying with it more or less of the valuable mineral salts, on which the fertility of ;he soil depends. On the othor hand, where the sub.soil is frozen, as it is in Alaska, Siberia and Manito ba (and these last two are great grana- aries), the rain and snowfall are abso- lutely prevented from percoIating away and with the result that all the valu- able products of the decay of the an- nual vegetation growing on the soil are retained in it, producing a working farm proposition equal to that found elsewhere for such crops as will grow and mature under a given annual amount of warmth and moisture.
 GAS every part of the world enjoys in the course of the year the same num- Der of hours of daylight, twelve hours of day and twelve hours of night, every 24 hours throughout the year, in the tropics, and six months of day and six months of night at the poles, there is an intermediate region where the days are long and the nights are short, with only few hours when the earth radi- ates heat instead of absorbing it.
 "As the result of these propositions, which can be easily verified by skeptics we have in Alaska the following con- ditions:
 "First-An equal number of hours of daylight annually with the tropics and all the rest of the world.
 "Second-During the growing season, a greater number of hours daily for plant growth, because of the long days and the short period of darkness, dur. ing which the earth radiates heat. in stead of absorbing it.
 "Third-A soil enriched annually by the products of decaying vegetation. "Fourth--A perpetual source of mois- ture in the frozen ground, which is given up to the searching rootlets as they follow the thawed surface ground downward, thus securing immunity from drought
 "These things explain the forests on the moraines of the glaciers and the boundless acres of tall grass in the Panama valley"