Ill 



columns of the daily Press, and, sooner or later, your eye will 

 light on that sombre line : "The crop has failed this year owing 

 to drought." And the amazing thing is that no remedy is ever 

 suggested, no preventive is ever proposed. Decade after decade, 

 year in and year out, drought finds the farmer unprepared, watch- 

 ing sadly his withering crop in sun-scorched waterless soil. 



The Alpha and Omega in the fight against drought is the 

 moisture-saving fallow. Without it all efifort is useless. With 

 it all soil-drought disappears. Suppose we start with the bare 

 moisture-saving fallow and we conserve six inches of rain out of 

 a 12-inch annual rainfall. We hold the fallow for a year and 

 then sow our wheat in a moist seed-bed. The second season 

 another twelve inches may fall in the field, of which, say, six 

 inches are utilized by the plants, and so, at the end of the second 

 year, instead of one or two possible failures, we reap a SO-bushel"'- 

 (12-inch rainfall) crop of wheat. The establishment of a moist- 

 ure savings bank to pay cash on demand is the fundamental prin- 

 ciple in dealing successfully with recurrent seasonal droughts. 

 This practice is strongly advocated by the foremost Australian 

 authority on dry-farming, Sutton of New South Wales, who 

 writes : 



"Tn dry districts a proper system of fallowing is therefore an 

 essential of success, and the general adoption of a proper system 

 in our wheat districts is a factor which will do more than any 

 other to remove wheat-growing from the area of speculation and 

 place it on a sound and solid basis. With a proper system in 

 practice, the rainfall of the previous, or a portion of the previous 

 year, can be stored, conserved, and utilized for a subsequent 

 crop." 



And he closed an instructive address to an assemblage of farm- 

 ers with these words : ''Go back home and fallow till harvest 

 time, and when the harvest is over, start to work the fallow and 

 keep at it until seed-time." 



It may be said that the practice of growing crops on only half 

 of the arable land and maintaining the other half in clean fallows 

 means a good deal of extra labor. That is so, but it also means a 

 certain crop in seasons of drought. It may be said that the con- 

 tinuous cultivation of the moisture-saving fallows will eventually 

 burn out the vegetable matter in the soil. It may be so ; but the 

 remedy is at hand. On worn-out fallows you can always grow 

 green legumes, fill the soil with nitrogen, and so gradually estab- 

 lish a humus bank. These two saving banks — the Moisture Bank 

 and the Hvmius Bank — will secure the farmer against the severest 

 drought and make possible a permanent fertility on the dry-lands 

 of South Africa. 



* Widtsoe calculates the crop-i^rodueing power of rainfall as follows: 

 One acre inch of water will produce 2i/> bushels of wheat. 

 Ten acres inches of water will produce 2.5 bushels of wheat. 

 Twenty acres inches of water will produce 50 bushels of wheat. 



