I 4 8 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



a particularly luxuriant growth of vegetation during past ages, it has 

 served to preserve within the soil the products of decomposition of such 

 vegetation as has been produced. It has also assisted in the produc- 

 tion of large quantities of those chemical salts upon which plants 

 depend for their nourishment, and the evaporation being in excess of 

 the precipitation, the tendency has been to keep these beneficial salts 

 near the surface instead of having them either carried far below the 

 reach of plant roots by seepage, or removed by the excess of water 

 which occurs in more humid countries. 



Already methods have been devised and are in practice throughout 

 the area whereby the moisture of the soil can be conserved and crops 

 may be raised under conditions of drought that have in the past 

 proved absolutely prohibitive of agricultural production. The intro- 

 duction and development of drought-resistant plants is now enabling 

 farmers in many parts of the area to produce crops of grain during 

 years of drought so severe that it would be impossible to raise any of 

 the grains that were originally introduced into the area from the more 

 humid parts of the country. The development of cultural methods, 

 crop rotations, plant adaptation, and farm organization is only just 

 begun, and in time there will be no part of this area that will not be 

 producing much more than at the present time. 



The success of dry farming as it is now practiced in the semi arid 

 districts of the Great Plains area depends upon the application in the 

 most thorough manner of the principles of tillage which have been 

 practiced to a greater or less extent for several hundred years. Settlers 

 who came to the more humid portions of the trans-Mississippi region 

 soon discovered that with the fertile and easily tilled soils and abun- 

 dant rainfall of these districts it was* possible to produce crops suc- 

 cessfully with much less labor than is usually bestowed upon them in 

 the less-favored portions of the East. This led to very superficial 

 and slovenly methods of tillage. Often the land was plowed only once 

 in several years (and then only to a depth of 3 or 4 inches), the grain 

 being "disked in" upon the unplowed stubble of the previous year's 

 crop. This system became less and less remunerative as the soil 

 became exhausted of organic matter, and the farmers learned by 

 costly experience that even in the more humid portions of the Great 

 Plains some other system of tillage would be necessary in order to 

 maintain the fertility of their farms. 



As settlements extended westward into the drier districts the same 

 shiftless methods were used as those at first practiced farther east. A 



