CHAPTER ELEVEN 



Eastern 

 farming 

 methods 

 not suc- 

 cessful in 

 the West 



Two 



Western 



methods 



Conditions 

 required 

 in dry 

 farming 



DRY FARMING AND IRRIGATION 



The desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. 



ISAIAH 



IN the western half of the United States there are 

 many places with so little rainfall that good crops cannot 

 be raised by the methods used in the eastern half of the 

 country. When the West was first settled there were 

 many crop failures, because the farmers, who had come 

 from the East, had not learned what changes they needed 

 to make in the methods that they had successfully used 

 where rain was plentiful. 



Two systems of farming have now come into use in 

 the West : dry farming and farming with irrigation. 

 It is possible to produce much larger crops and a greater 

 variety of them if irrigation can be used, but there are 

 many places where, as yet, the farmers cannot get water 

 for irrigation. In such regions a fair yield of certain 

 crops can be secured by dry-farming methods, provided 

 the rainfall is not too small. 



Dry farming. It must not be thought that dry farm- 

 ing means farming without moisture. No crop will 

 grow without water, and the ordinary farm crops require 

 three hundred pounds or more of water to make one 

 pound of crop. That is, this large amount of water 

 must pass from the roots up through the stem and be 

 lost by evaporation from the leaves in order to produce 

 enough plant substance to weigh a pound after it is dry. 

 It is known that a large sunflower leaf has about thir- 



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