Preparing land for irrigation and methods of applying water . s until the target is on a levelwith the instrument. These points on the contour may be marked bysmall piles of dirt or by temporary stakes. It is a good plan to followthe rodman, keeping about 200 feet in his rear, with some sort of ditchplow which markseach contour by afurrow. A walking-plow is not suitablefor this purpose,since the plowmanmust be elevated inorder to see over thehorses and improveon the line indicatedby the stakes, ormarks, by roundingout the angles. In like manner other contours are laid out until the40-acre trac
Preparing land for irrigation and methods of applying water . s until the target is on a levelwith the instrument. These points on the contour may be marked bysmall piles of dirt or by temporary stakes. It is a good plan to followthe rodman, keeping about 200 feet in his rear, with some sort of ditchplow which markseach contour by afurrow. A walking-plow is not suitablefor this purpose,since the plowmanmust be elevated inorder to see over thehorses and improveon the line indicatedby the stakes, ormarks, by roundingout the angles. In like manner other contours are laid out until the40-acre tract presents the appearance shown in figure 6. The next task is to subdivide the space between the contours intochecks of suitable size and provide for the location of boundary andfield ditches to convey water to each check. No hard and fast rule canbe laid down for the arrangement of the ditches. The field under con-sideration may be subdivided as shown in figure 7, in which the doublelines indicate the ditches and single lines levees. This 40-acre tract ST]. Fig. \ -Contour checks 31 would thus contain about 40 checks. If conditions were favorableand it was deemed advisable to have the checks contain on an average2 acres instead of 1, the same diagram would apply to an 80-acre tract. Many farmers prefer to go to extra expense and to handle moresurface earth in order to have rectangular checks. Figure 8 shows thesame field laid out in rectangular checks as nearly uniform in size asthe nature of the ground will permit. In building the levees around the checks scrapers are generally high parts within each check are first scraped down and the mate-rial thus obtained is dumped along the levees. The balance of theearth required to complete the banks is obtained from the highestparts of the interior of the checks, which leaves this space quite rough,but fairly level. The field is then plowed and harrowed in the usual way and the seedsown. The tiice of sowing alfalfa extends f
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