308 ; DRY-FARMING 
soils, subjected to the intense heat of the western sun, 
become very hard. In the handling of such soils the 
disk plow has been found to be most useful. The 
common experience of dry-farmers is that when . 
sagebrush lands have been cleared, the first plowing 
can be most successfully done with the disk plow, but 
Fic. 77. Disk plow. 
that after the first crop has been harvested, the 
stubble land can be best handled with the moldboard 
plow. All this, however, is yet to be subjected to 
further tests. (See Fig. 77.) 
While subsoiling results in a better storage reser- 
voir for water and consequently makes dry-farming 
more secure, yet the high cost of the practice will 
probably never make it popular. Subsoiling is ac- 
complished in two ways: either by an ordinary mold- 
board plow which follows the plow in the plow fur- 
row and thus turns the soil to a greater depth, or by 
some form of the ordinary subsoil plow. In general, 
