292 CAMPBELL'S SOIL CULTURE MANUAL 



uates. However, no farmer in the arid belt need hope 

 for even moderate success without unceasing diligence. 



Twenty years ago Mr. J. P. Pomeroy, now of Colorado 

 Springs, acquired 30,000 acres of land in Graham county, 

 western Kansas, and founded Hill City almost in the center 

 of the tract. For fourteen years portions of this tract were 

 cultivated by old-fashioned methods. In all that time 

 only one good crop was harvested, that being in a season 

 when the rainfall was abnormally large. He had heard of 

 Mr. Campbell and his system of dry farming and sent for 

 him, telling him to go ahead and shew him just what he 

 could do on land on which profitable farming by ordinary 

 methods had proven to be impossible. Mr. Campbell laid 

 out a model farm on the very land that had been tried often 

 with discouraging results. Last season the sixth successive 

 crop was harvested. In the fourteen years in which old- 

 fashioned methods were followed, thirteen failures were 

 scored. In the six years in which the Campbell 

 system has been on trial on the same lands, a crop failure 

 has been unknown. The smallest yield of wheat per acre 

 in that time has been thirty-five bushels, while farmers 

 close by have never obtained more than thirteen bushels 

 per acre, and very rarely even that. The yields of corn, 

 oats, potatoes, alfalfa, berries, small fruits, and vegetables 

 is equal to that obtained from the average irrigated farms 

 around Greeley, Fort Collins, Grand Junction, and other 

 parts of Colorado ' 'under the ditch." On this farm there 

 is also a six-year-old orchard that is in prime condition, the 

 trees being as large as eight-year-old trees in the famous 

 fruit growing district of Palisades. A more complete 

 vindication of all the claims made by the advocates of the 

 practicability of farming on the plains without irrigation 

 could not well be imagined, 



