PREFACE 



Since the rainy season of 1905, when accidental plantings of 

 barley by teamsters feeding- their animals by the roadside attracted 

 the attention of land-hungry settlers, a persistent and increasingly 

 ingenious effort has been made to discover methods of utilizing our 

 semi-arid lands for farming purposes. In the -southern part of the 

 State at the altitudes of the great valleys it is fairly well determined 

 that the ordinary rainfall should be supplemented by stored or 

 pumped irrigating waters, used at critical times to start or save a 

 crop. Subsequent work in the northern part of the State at some- 

 what higher average altitudes indicates that it is possible, with good 

 management and skillful handling, to produce a fairly reliable out- 

 put of dry-farmed forages without the help of irrigating water. 



In the southern part of the State the crops apparently best 

 adapted to altitudes of 4000 feet Avith a long growing season, include 

 Kafir, Club-top sorghum, milo, and tepary beans. In the northern 

 part of the State, under less stringent conditions, the crops that 

 may be grown include not only Kafir, Club-top sorghum, milo, and 

 tepary beans, but also various Indian corns such as Papago sweet 

 corn, ^^'hit(' Hopi corn and other cpiick growing, drought resistant 

 varieties. Sudan grass for hay, potatoes and several varieties of 

 beans, and even orchard fruits, have been found feasible under these 

 conditions. 



But of equal importance with the production of these forages 

 has been their preservation as silage, in which form but a small per- 

 centage of nutritive value is lost as compared with the very great 

 loss in nutritive value incidental to the common practice of cutting 

 and shocking such forages. It has been found possible at the Pres- 

 cott Dry-farm to produce from 3 to over 20 tons of silage per acre 

 grown on an average rainfall of L^.4 inches for the past six years. 

 This silage is used to great advantage in connection with live stock 

 *of all kinds, ]-)articularly range cattle which are subject from year 

 to year to a period of shortage during which an average of two per 

 cent or more die, the remainder coming through in very poor condi- 

 tion for the next season's operations. Experiments with silage at 

 the Prescott Drv-farm last vear, which are being repeated on a 



