A2 THE FUTURE OF ARID LANDS 
emergency feed crops. Effective local schemes are necessary to 
give firm protection of water supplies for such use. In fact, water 
and favorable soil for feed crops on a small area can stabilize the 
grazing economy of a region several hundred times its size. 
The economic, social, and administrative problems for range 
improvement are really more difficult now than the purely tech- 
nical ones. The areas most needing reduced grazing and careful 
management are often the very ones where local residents most 
strongly feel that they cannot reduce their livestock, especially 
if marketing facilities are inadequate. 
In large parts of the world, arid grazing lands could support 
several times the present numbers of livestock if well-known ~ 
management practices could be installed during a temporary 
period of reduced use. Even where experiments have demon- 
strated greater production of livestock products from half or 
less the numbers of animals, it is not easy to convince local herds- 
men to reduce numbers. 
Although we have made much progress in the basic and applied 
research among the natural sciences related to range management, 
much less has been done in the social sciences aside from produc- 
tion economics. Associations of farmers and ranchers in grazing 
districts and soil conservation districts have helped. Still these 
devices fall short of meeting the problem in many places. 
Dry Land Cereal Growing 
During periods of unusual moisture and with strong economic 
pressure, or local demand for food, many arid soils are broken 
out for cereal grains. This happened during both world wars in 
parts of the United States as well as in many other countries. 
In parts of the Near East, cereal growing presses very hard 
against the desert all the time. 
Near the margin between arid soils and other soils, higher 
yields on a more nearly sustained basis can be expected on deep 
soils of good structure than on thin soils with low water-holding 
capacity or on structureless sandy soils easily subject to serious 
blowing. But once these thin or sandy soils are in cultivated 
fields, it is hard to get them back into grass. Here again the most 
