The Birmingham age-herald., 1918-12-08

all are accessible by water and rail to the markets. There are something like 72,o00,000 acres east of the great plains and 20,000,000 or 30,000,0 acres in the Mississippi delta. Minnesota has about 100000 We look upon Illinois as thoroughly settled; it is the heart of the corn belt and 1t has oodles of land worth $500 an acre. Nevertheless there are more than 100000 acres of I flooded lands in Illinois that might | be redeemed and every acre will bo as rich as any now farmed. There are IT different states in the east, every | one of which has more than 100000 acres of swamps, and there are 12 l others each of which has from a quar- 1 ter of a million to 100000 acres that can be easily drained.
 l The average stay-at-home of the east looks upon California as arid rather
 than wet. Nevertheless that state has
 some of our richest swamp lands. The
 Sacramento valley is several hundred miles long and its basin has millions of acres of wet lands which the gov- ernment geographers have recently mapped. Drainage is going on there land land which a few years ago was worth nothing is now being sold as fast as it can be reclaimed at from s100 to 5000 an acre.. In the Sacramento river
 they have put dikes about an island and l pumped out the water, and that is- land has now the largest asparagus farm of the world. In other places along the river the redeemed lands are
 devoted to celery, and they are now lshipping carloads of that and other veg
 etables from there to the east.
 The delta of the Mississippi has swamp lands that are far more valuable thanthe irrigated lands of Mesopotamia about the Tigris and Euphrates, for (which the Kaiser planned his railroad from Berlin to Bagdad. The swamps there include more than 20,000 900 acres and they are so rich that any 40 acres will make good farm. MWhen the land is redeemed 1t Is worth $100 or upward Iper acre. and reclamation projects have
 already been undertaken by private par ties here and there through it. Some of these are right on the edge of the cities. During my last visit to New Or lleans I rode in a motor car from the principal hotel out to 7000-acre vege- liable and fruit garden. which had been lifted, as it were, out of the bed Of the iswamp. The land is only five miles from the heart of the city, and it is richer than any part of the delta of the lNile or the Ganges. l saw thousands Iof orange trees and hundreds of acres Iof corn and cotton growing upon that Hand, and was told that the cost of maintaining the drainage, after the land had been cleared and the pumping ar arrangements installed, IS only 50 to 75 lcents per acre per annum. The tract I referred to is kept clear by pumping Its steam pumps are daily lifting hum 1dreds of millions of gallons of water from it's canals, and throwing it into
 the streams which carry it off into the
 Mexican gulf.
 There are extensive swamp lands in
 Alabama and Georgia, and the same Is itrue of Arkansas and Mississippi. A lcompany has been organized and plans
 made to redeem a half million acres in the Yazoo basin. There are others ischemes going on in other states, and especially In Florida, where millions of acres are being reclaimed. The availa- lble lands in Florida are almost as great las the whole state of South Carolina, g state which itself has large area oi lswamps. In North Carolina and Virgin
 ia we have wet lands that will ado igreatly to our food supply. In Nortf
 Carolna Lake Mattamuskeet has beer
 pumped out and it's 50,000 acres is now
 cut up into small farms. The tract i;
 called New Holland. The settled land:
 about 1t are so rich that farms bring
 $100 and upward per acre.
 | Farther north In Virginia, not fal from Norfolk, lies about l50,000 acre that will some day be a winter marke 1 garden for New York and Boston. , refer to the great Dismal swamp, tn , edges of which have already been re . deemed. The lake Is surrounded b, 1 lands devoted to trucking and tn , soil under it is exceedingly rich. Tn first crop usually raised after clearing , such lands is what is known as sticl , corn For this no blowing or cultiva
 tion is needed. The kernels are plante,
 in holes in the ground made by sticl : and the corn springs up among tn : stumps, conquering the weeds am |. yielding large crops This is only a 7 first. After a year or so the land mus | be treated like that of other farms o 2 similar soil
 Coming to the cut-over lands whicl