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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 cr0p 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 flows cd' into the streams and is of no direct benefit to agriculture. This excess of rainfall reaches the streams partly by flowing 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. 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.

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