XXVIII 

 THE TRACTION ENGINE IN DRY -FARMING 



DRY- FARMING" is a relative term. It implies 

 agriculture in sections where there is a normal 

 scarcity of moisture during the growing season. 

 Roughly, the dry-farming area in the United States 

 lies west of the Missouri River in the North and the 99th me- 

 ridian in Nebraska and Kansas, while in the South it includes 

 the great plains area of Oklahoma, Texas, and the states to 

 the West. It stretches westward to the Rocky Mountains, 

 and northward far beyond the 49th parallel into the Northwest 

 Provinces of Canada. Within this great body of land are the 

 hundreds of thousands of dry-farms that lie outside the scope 

 of practical irrigation, and on which unusual methods must 

 be adopted to conserve moisture if these semi-arid tracts are 

 to compete in any way with the green gardens under the ditches. 

 Through necessity, it has been demonstrated that the "Great 

 American Desert" of the eighties is capable of producing the 

 food of many millions of people. Rapid immigration and a 

 demand for farm products far outrunning any possible increase 

 through more intensive cultivation in the East, have made 

 necessary the invasion of the semi-arid West, the adoption of 

 new methods and more efficient equipment. The cattleman, 

 using twenty-five acres to support a steer, has reluctantly given 

 way to the settler. Yet dry-farming has until recently pro- 

 gressed slowly and failures have multiplied. High winds and 

 lack of rainfall make work extremely difficult for animals to 

 withstand during the hottest of the growing season. It has 



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