this earth and the fact that it rains, I think that we all should live up 

 to the before mentioned obligation. 



Let us take a look at the native range as we saw it about 12 years ago 

 this month. At this time when we bought this particular small ranch of which 

 we have since put three of them together to make a still small ranch, these 

 ranches had been overrun with horses that had been on this range during the 

 dirty thirties. The man that we bought it from had run quite a sizable am- 

 ount of workhorses to do a small amount of farming. We can see with the 

 trained eye of the rangeman to identify the prickly pear, fringed sagewort, 

 big sage, club moss, and the few grass stems protruding above the club moss 

 and fringe sage, that are taking the majority of the available moisture, is 

 blue grama. 



I think we all agree that there has got to be a method to improve this 

 and we'll take a look at one of the first range improvement machines that we 

 built and tried out on the range. We tried about eight before we settled on 

 this one that we built ourselves. We put the interseeder on it and here we 

 are doing what we call contour furrowing. 



There was a group of North Dakota cattlemen that came over and looked 

 at the operation. One rather large individual got out of a brand new cad- 

 ilac and he stretched, after about the third stop on a tour, and said, "You 

 know something fellows, I kinda like this cowboy farming." I guess maybe 

 that is cowboy farming for a lack of a better name. We could probably call 

 it that but it does look very radical. 



This is a closeup of the land after furrowing and you will notice that 

 we have a lot of different types of soil but for the most part it is a dense 

 clay. Now, let us take a look at this same site one grazing season later. 

 I think you will have to admit that if we cultivate this ground properly 

 that it can utilize the moistixre that falls instead of having it run off 

 and that we can further production quite a lot. You will notice some an- 

 nuals, this happens to be mustard and if you will look in the very bottom 

 of the furrow you'll see new alfalfa seeding there. 



It is not a Utopia, it is not designed nor is it intended to be utilized 

 in all types of rangeland. Now, there are some "don't's" that go with cow- 

 boy farming. Don't do a drainage where you depend on runoff for stockwater. 



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