THE DEVELOPMENT OF DRY FARMING 5 



to have been based on any knowledge of ancient methods. 

 Here the system grew up independently in each of four 

 different parts of the continent, (1) in the State of 

 Utah, in the southern part of the inter-mountain region, 

 (2) in western Kansas and Nebraska, the central part of 

 the great plains, (3) in Western Canada, in the northern 

 great plains, and (4) in California and Oregon. In each 

 of these areas a system of crop growing developed ap- 

 parently without knowledge of the methods followed in 

 any of the others, until the popular "dry farming" move- 

 ment was initiated within the last thirty years. 



To the Mormons of Utah belongs the distinction of be- 

 ing the first civilized people to grow crops on "dry" land 

 in America. Upon their arrival in Salt Lake City in 

 1847 only irrigated land was used for crop growing, but 

 in the sixties it was observed that cultivated land above 

 the ditch was capable of producing fair crops without 

 irrigation. In the early eighties dry farming became an 

 established system in many of the unirrigated portions 

 of the state. 



In California dry land cultivation commenced in the 

 late sixties. Two decades later the colonization of much 

 of the dry land of Nebraska and Kansas was attempted 

 without success, but in the late eighties more satisfactory 

 practices came into vogue and the tide of emigration 

 commenced to return to the abandoned homesteads of 

 the earlier era only to be turned eastward again by un- 

 favorable seasons in the middle nineties. It was about 

 this time that H. W. Campbell of "Dry Farm" fame 

 was getting his early experience in the dry part of South 

 Dakota. The ideas he developed there and later in Ne- 

 braska, where summer tillage frequently gave him large- 

 ly increased yields, were organized and published at 



