DRY FARMING CONGRESS. 



51 



PROF. L. A. MERRILL (editor of The Deseret Farmer and mana- 

 ger of the Utah Arid Farm Association, Salt Lake City) : Ladies and 

 Gentlemen: I have had considerable experience with this question of 

 machinery on the farm. As some of you are aware, we have had a farm 

 down in Juab county, consisting of some nine thousand acres. Some three 

 or four years ago we made up our minds that the only way to bring that 

 under successful cultivation was by means of the traction engine, and there 

 are those of you here tonight who know of our experience, probably, with 

 the first traction engine put there. I am free to say that I believe that the 

 men who sold the first traction engines in the state were entirely honest. 

 I believe that they were just as honest in selling those engines to us as 

 we were in buying them. They had had no experience with traction plow- 

 ing in the arid country. Our soils are entirely different from the soils of 

 the East. And before purchasing these engines we went East, two or 

 three members of the company, and saw traction engines successfully plow- 

 ing the soft lands of the humid West,- and especially in Iowa and Illinois, 

 and for that reason we thought that traction plowing would be successful 

 here. But when we came to ordering the engines and got them here, we 

 found that the ground would simply slip underneath the wheel, and the 

 engine was not able to make any headway at all, and no matter how we 

 reduced the number of plows behind the engine — cutting down from 12 

 to 8 plows — the engine would not work successful!}- under those condi- 

 tions. We were very much discouraged. We were of the conviction that 

 arid farming would be a failure in this state if we had to resort to horse- 

 power. Last spring we tried this. We purchased a large number of 

 horses and attempted for weeks to plow our tract of land with horses, 

 but made such slow headway that we became entirely discouraged, and 

 finally made up our minds we had to purchase another kind of engine. 

 I am not selling engines. I want to make that clear right here. I am 

 not the agent of any engine or concern, but I am convinced that there are 

 engines on the market that can be successfully made to plow this land; 

 and I believe on our farm we have successfull}^ solved the problem of farm- 

 ing or plowing the land. I believe in handling large tracts of land under 

 arid conditions. It is absolutely essential that we have machinery that will 

 enable us to reduce the cost to a minimum. I don't believe it is possible, 

 where we expect such small yields as are expected on arid farms, where 

 the expenses are so great and labor so expensive, to farm with success 

 on a small farm. We have to introduce expensive machinery, and we have 

 to reduce the cost to the very lowest minimum. 



We purchased an engine with a wheel five feet in width — with tire 

 five feet wide 



A DELEGATE: Five feet! 



MR. MERRILL: Five feet, yes sir. The wheel has a diameter of 

 seven feet. The engine is a 110-horse-power engine. And I want to say 

 here — and there are those in the audience who can corroborate what I 

 do say — that we went out for many days during last season and plowed 

 eighty acres during the twenty-four hours. We have procured two sets 



