DRY FARMING CONGRESS 



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financial aid and advice and by a series of soil moisture investigations. 

 The soil moisture work is intended to determine, 'if possible, the funda- 

 mental principles of soil culture under dry farming conditions. Many of 

 3-0U perhaps appreciate that in this great dry farming Conference there 

 are many differences of opinion expressed by practical farmers and experts. 

 "Dry Farming," in the first place, is a very unfortunate term for so great 

 an industry as this promises to be. Everyone with any practical experi- 

 ence knows that crops cannot be made to grow without a supply of water. 

 The name ''dry farming" has given rise in some localities in the East to 

 the erroneous opinion that some new system of farming has been dis- 

 covered which enables plants to grow without water. Should any person 

 settle on the dry farming areas of the arid West with this notion they 

 are doomed to disappointment. It is true that certain crops have been 

 educated through many generations, by being exposed to drought, to l)e- 

 come drought resistant, or have been so adapted as to do with less water 

 than crops of the same varieties or other close relations grown under con- 

 ditions of plentiful moisture. The name "dry farming," however, appears 

 to have come to stay, and it becomes the duty of everyone who has the 

 best interest of the science at heart to try to discover the real principles 

 on vvdiich this .small rainfall farming is based and spread reliable informa- 

 tion among those who are interested in the subject, but have not thor- 

 oughly understood the conditions. 



From the standpoint of an irrigation engineer, dry farming did not at 

 first appeal very strongl}^ to me. Many irrigation men felt at first, and 

 some still feel, that the great areas of the arid West subject to irrigation 

 should first be settled and brought info a state of intensive cultivation 

 before a system of agriculture, new as far as the Rocky Mountain States 

 are concerned, should be initiated and experimented with. There was also 

 a memory of the great farming boom in western Nebraska and Kansas 

 which ended in disaster in many localities in the early eighties. With a 

 need of thousands of settlers to take advantage of the areas reclaimed by 

 irrigation under private enterprise, the Carey Land Law and the Recla- 

 mation Act, the irrigationists felt an injustice was being done to farmers 

 induced to settle the open range with no other resources than those they 

 could find in the comparatively dry soil. 



But dry farming is becoming more of a science, a less hazardous occu- 

 pation than it was in the early eighties.^ It has been found by such 

 pioneers in this line as Doctor Cooke of Cheyenne and Mr. Campbell of 

 Lincoln. Dr. Widtsoe of Utah, and many others here to-day, that there is 

 a sound basis for dry farming — in conserving practically all of the moisture 

 that does fall from the sky and turning it to a useful purpose in growing 

 crops, instead of allowing it to evaporate from the soil into the air or 

 seep far below the roots of the crops, thus being wasted so far as agri- 

 culture is concerned. Sometimes this moisture, especially from a light rain- 

 fall, and I might say a very light irrigation, was worse than wasted, for it 

 did a positive injury to the soil and hence to the plants on the soil. A 

 light rainfall on a fine mulch on the soil has a tendency to form a crust 



