In the advanced farms stock are watered from tanks fed by subsoil water raised by windmills. Wherever there are no permanent springs these mills, Mr. Willcocks thinks, might be made compulsory. He says: "I have seen stock drinking from shallow pools which contained mud rather than water, and in which dead sheep were festering. It might be possible to legislate that, if a reservoir is constructed, it must be fenced round and protected from entry by stock. The reservoir dam should be pierced by a pipe discharging into a trough, from which cattle should be given to drink." This would protect the water from pollution and save the cattle from contracting rinderpest and spreading it all over the country.
The farms have a general area of some 12,000 acres each, with about twelve acres of cultivated land per farm. This means about one acre of arable land to a thousand acres of pastoral land. The cultivated area is divided thus--one acre of fruit or vegetable garden to about eleven acres under wheat, Indian corn, lucerne, and oat-hay. Here, the veldt will carry one sheep--these are principally merinos--or a goat, to four acres; or one ox to sixteen acres.[10]
North of Britstown the pan and vale formation begins, a formation consisting of alternate ridges of rounded dolomite hills and flat depressions which are either vales or pans. Vales have outlets for the water which collects in them, pans usually have none. Some are natural reservoirs of great capacity. The pans, when not brack, are the natural reservoirs of the country. Mr. Willcocks has shown how both pans and vales may be dealt with to the best advantage, and how the direct storage of water and the indirect storage of it should be effected.
Still touring in the Cape Colony, he turned his attention to the Kat, Kabossi, Keishma, Klipparts, and other streams near the sea, which have a perennial discharge with a minimum of about 100 cubic feet per second, yet which are scarcely utilised. On this subject he reported: "The value of this water near the sea will never be appreciated till the idea is abandoned that cereals are the only crops worth growing and that manures are not necessary. The attempt to grow cereals year after year without manure and without rotation of crops has made the wheat crops so liable to rust that agriculture is discounted everywhere near the sea. Wherever perennial water of any kind can be obtained in the important stock districts of the Eastern Provinces, lucerne, at least, might be planted to the utmost limits of the water."