Page:Agricultural Progress - Drainage.djvu/13

 are nearly 5,000,000 of acres that require close drainage, the cost of which, at £6 per acre, would involve an outlay of £30,000,000. Assuming that that outlay was expended, and estimating the returns therefrom at 15 per cent, per annum, the value of the increase of produce accruing therefrom would amount to £4,500,000.

Considering such vast returns from drainage, embraced in lighter tillage labour, less seed, larger crops, the substitution of roots for naked fallows, of sheep husbandry for exclusive corn cropping; in the utilising of rain-water, which formerly only denuded the soil of plant food; the ploughing of land level instead of into ridges, a greater depth of available soil, reformed pastures, and earlier crops, it is truly surprising that there is so large an area to drain, and notwithstanding drainage progresses so slowly.

Since the Government loan, which gave the first impulse to drainage, was taken up, financial companies have greatly facilitated the execution of drainage works. During the last ten years the Lands Improvement Company has advanced loans on drainage in England to about £1,500,000. Estimating that the half of that sum has been advanced by all other financial companies and landlords together, the extent of land annually drained in England, computing the cost as above at £6 per acre, is only 37,500 acres. Progressing, therefore, only at the present rate, it will take 133 years to complete the drainage of wet land.

The profitable results obtained from drainage expenditure