Excerpt from Conditions in Soils of the Arid Region It is generally conceded that 20 inches of well-distributed rainfall in Kansas will make an abundant crop of wheat or corn. That there. Must be some rather anomalous condition here is shown by the fact that in much of the humid portion of the eastern United States there has never been so little as 20 inches of annual rainfall within the period of reliable records, and in years of most disastrous drought the rainfall has been greaterthan this. The fact that a crop can be made in Kansas and Nebraska with such a small annual rainfall is particularly striking when it is remembered that, owing to the drier conditions of the atmos phere, evaporation is very much greater there than in the East. There are localities in the West where the total annual rainfall does not exceed 6 or 8 inches. It does not seem possible that with this rainfall under ordinary circumstances crops could be produced by any system of agriculture, unless water were artificially supplied. How ever, it seems possible, outside of these exceptional cases, that with improved methods of cultivation the conditions actually existing can be so utilized as to secure reliable and satisfactory crops. Statistics show that in the humid portion of the United States, hav in g a mean annual rainfall of about 40 inches, 50 per cent ows ofi' into the streams and is of no direct benefit to agriculture. This excess of rainfall reaches the streams partly by owing over the surface of the ground and partly by slow percolation through the soil. Fifty per cent of the rainfall, or 20 inches per annum, evaporates directly from the surface of the soil or is transpired by plants. Practically, therefore, there are about 20 inches of rainfall at the disposal of agricultural plants, and the highest art of cultivation con sists in conserving this moisture, reducing that lost by evaporation from the surface soil to a minimum, and maintaining a sufficient amount at all times at the disposal of crops. There is one factor which has a very important bearing upon the con ditions in the humid as compared with those in the arid regions. In the humid region of the Eastern States the soil is continuously moist from the surface down to a depth at which it is completely saturated and from which water is constantly owing out into wells, streams, and rivers. The water descends through the soil both by virtue of its own Weight and by capillary force. According to capillary laws the water is pulled downward when the subsoil contains less water than the soil. Gravity and capillary force are both more effective in moving water through a moist subsoil than a dry one; hence there is danger in the East of the water being pulled down below the reach of plants in time of drought, while in the West, where the subsoil at the depth of a few feet is continuously dry, this could not happen. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."