IRRIGATION IN CANADA.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 12970, 25 November 1907, Page 6

IRRIGATION IN CANADA.

Among the items on the' Public Works Estimates this year is the sum of £3000 for irrigation and water supply in agricultural and mining districts. The ■mount i» a portion of £100,000 which it ia proposed to provide for tihis piirposo, but trivial as it is at ie gravely stated that it is proposed to go ora with actual construction work during tho summer. It is intended Ijy means of irrigation to anako available for settlement land An, arid dietriote, and it is .obvious that to propose to do too with £3000 is merely a piece/of political make-belioro. It waa the came with the rid iculoie vote for the development of water Kower, it ie the came with many of our railwaye—the Government prefer a. policy of dribs and drabs instead of Banking up their .minds ac to what inuefc he done, amd doing it. How different are the methods of Canada I Nothing has contributed more to the development of the great Dominion than the meaner in which railways have been pushed forward, And to-day the same businose-liko syefcan is 'being pursued in regard to irrigation. The Canadian Pacific Railway has now in , hand, in the rich province of Alberta, which was described in an article by Mr B/ugh H. Lusk in our issue of Saturday, a scheme of irrigation .■which should .put an entirely new face on agriculture throughout aai area of fully a million and a half acres. The cost of the wwk is estimated at a million sterling. The district to be watered lies east of the thriving fcwn of Calgary, • and ie divided, into three sections, of which, one i«svio be developed to Hβ utmost capacity .beforo work is begun on the others. The water is taien from the Bow River by a hwgo channel seventeen miles long, sixty feet wide at the bottom, and 120 ft at the (top, with a minimum depth of -watw of tens feet. From a reservoir created by damming a valley throe large eetondary canals ramify, ,each feeding many hundreds of miles of subsidiary waterways. The outeta,nding feature of the work is the thoroughness with which it has been carried out. . Mr Elwood Mead, late chief of the irrigation liramch of tho American Department of Agriculture, a,nd now in the employ of tho Commonwealth Government, one of the greatest living authorities on irrigation, has declared that the Alberta schemo probably etaaids alone on tho American Continent "in the care, time "and expense devoted to the prelimin"ary and final eurveye and the "methods of construction." Farmers in Gome parts of tho United States have had bitter experience df irrigation companies, and after paying for their land havo had to fight to secure their water rights, realising too late that they "liavo not bought irrigated "farms but lawsuits." Nothing of this kind can happen in Canada. Tho C..P.R/ guarantees to maintain all tho channels and distributing ditches in the Alberta scheme for two shillings per aero per anowim, the cost, of water is fixed hy law, and its provision has to be guaranteed under penalties for default.. The effectiveness* of the protection thus afforded to the farmeir is shown by the fact that although' 800 miles of irrigation channels havo been opeued in Canada fr» the past ton yoare, there has not been a single lawsuit in connection with the supply of water, Tho ATberta scheme is the result of a period of dry years in a province that is normally classed «■« semi- * rid, though in good eeasom there is

eufßcient moisture for the growth of crops. It waa retarded by a Bucceseion of unusually wet yeats, birt it wae enrentually decided, we *r» told, to carry it out for tho benefit of posterity and as an insurance egamst the ill effects of dry years.