"Practically no man can secure adequate drainage without being concerned in the drainage of his neighbor's land," said Mr. Peet. "If the neighbor objects the situation is complicated. And our drainage laws have been woefully inadequate to handle these problems."
But recently the farm bureau put it up to a conference of county agents of New York to get the "state leader" to appoint a state committee to work this thing out and persuade the state legislature to make the necessary amendments to the drainage law. The plan went through, and one of the laws passed compels an objecting property owner to open drains which are necessary for the relief of his neighbors. This law goes into effect next fall.
Farmers are looking to the farm bureau for help in the cleaning and repairing of some sixty drainage ditches constructed in the past under the county-commissioner plan. But the records on file in the county clerk's office are in bad shape. The farm bureau has taken it upon itself to arrange all this material so that it is available on a minute's notice, and as a result has drawn up petitions to the supervisors for the cleaning out of three of these ditches.
Cooperating with the New York State Food Commission, the farm bureau had a power-tractor ditcher placed in the county last summer. Peet placed his assistant in full charge, and the machine never lost a single day as a result of lack of supervision. It has dug over 4000 rods of ditch for tile on twenty-eight farms.
For four years Niagara County farmers had not made expenses in growing tomatoes for the canneries. The farm bureau called a meeting of some fourteen growers and together they figured the cost of production. The average cost for 1917 was found to be $85 an acre; the estimated cost for 1918 was $108 an acre. The average crop was set at six tons to the acre. A joint committee went out of the conference and laid these facts before the canners. The result was that the growers got $20 a ton for their crops in 1918.
These are some outstanding features of the service rendered its farmers by the Niagara bureau. Here are some of its "lesser" activities:
Taking an agricultural census by school districts of each farm in the county and completing the job in one week.
Effecting an interchange of livestock and seed.
Distributing 1000 bushels of seed corn among 383 farmers, twenty-two tons of nitrate of soda at cost among sixty-two farmers, and securing and distributing six tons of sugar to fifty beekeepers for wintering bees.
Indorsing 200 applications for military furloughs.