DRY FARMING CONGRESS. 



Ill 



our conditions, we s^y that the land must be loose underneath; it must 

 sta}^ in a granular form; it must be in such condition that the soil grains 

 will be surrounded by grains of moisture, and it must stay as an entity, 

 so that each grain of soil will be surrounded by a film of moisture, and 

 that the soil shall retain sufficient moisture to allow the grain to take 

 proper root. 



There are a great many people who sa}' that the question of arid 

 farming depends very largely upon the way the moisture is distributed 

 throughout the season; if we get a rainfall during a certain season we 

 can dr}^ farm successfully. I have heard even in our state, here, where we 

 are farming successfull}", a great man}' farmers depending on May or 

 June, when the showers come. I want to say if you will follow this 

 through, the years that we get the best results are the years when we 

 have light rains during that season. If you are a praying man or believe 

 in prayer, pray that we don't have any moisture, or pray that the moist- 

 ure that comes in ]\Iay or June shall be ver}' light, simph' because that 

 is the period we want to be our period of drouth, if we are going to 

 have a period of drouth. You want the root to extend down in deep into 

 the soil and not spread out over a large area, and if the rains come in 

 the earl}- spring months the roots have a tendency to spread out near 

 the surface, if the water is very near the surface, and we get a shallow- 

 rooted plant, whereas we want the plants to have a tendency to send 

 their roots down deep into the soil, and for that reason we don't care 

 whether the rains come during that particular season of the year, and in 

 fact would rather they would not. It has been demonstrated we can go 

 for months without a.ny rainfall at all, if we have the moisture stored in 

 the soil. There are places in this state where they have been storing 

 and conserving the moisture for ten or twenty 3-ears, keeping it stored 

 up in the soil, and then when the plant is put in the soil there is suffi- 

 cient moisture to carr}' it through whether the}' get any rain or not. 

 That is the idea we are trying to follow in dry farming in Utah. We 

 believe in deep plowing because we want this moisture to spread down 

 around each one of these soil grains. When Bishop Farrell first started 

 his experiments in Cache \^alley. many years ago, and Mr. Salisbury 

 started his experiments, they both had this experience: They went out 

 and sowed the same amount of seed on their land as they had been ac- 

 customed to sowing on irrigated land, a. bushel and a half and two 

 bushels and a half, and as a consequence there wasn't sufficient moisture 

 in the ground to nourish the plant. The plants came up, and there not 

 being sufficient moisture in the ground to carry them through they waited 

 and died. And ^^Ir. Salisbur}' said that his failures during the first three 

 or four years were simply because he did not learn the great lesson of 

 simply putting sufficient seed on the land to be reconciled with the 

 amount of moisture present there to carry it through. So now it has 

 come, in Utah, that we are advocating the idea of seeding a very small 

 amount of seed. We don't la}' down any very set rules. We say about 

 two pecks, or three pecks, or four pecks of seed ought to be used. But 



