132 



DRY FARMING CONGRESS. 



properly prepared in his moisture contents for starting his crop and 

 carrying it over a period which may be devoid of rain, unusually so, and 

 abnormally so the succeeding year. The experience here in Montana 

 and in most dry farming areas indicates that careful cultivating and 

 summer fallowing will do this. Whether it is most economical is an- 

 other problem, but that is one way. Cultivating one year in three will 

 fortify and insure to a large extent crop returns. And when the pessimist 

 on dry farming says to me, "Just wait until you get one of those dry 

 years," I usually smile a little bit and say, "Well, possibly if we get one 

 of those dry years the year preceding it will probably be a wet one, and 

 we have a lot of that moisture in the soil to carry us over, and we are not 

 going to suffer when the dry year comes." Sometimes the dry years 

 may make it difficult, but these are the things we have to take up and 

 handle. I believe some management must be devised by which the dry 

 farming business will be a universal success. 



I do not intend to go into the full discussion of the proposition of 

 the different methods for conserving soil moisture. I believe you are 

 all very familiar with the various methods by which we can conserve the 

 moisture in the soil. I intend to offer you* here some results we have 

 gained this year a3 the result of our investigations in soil moisture. 

 These are the results of one year only, remember, and they were made 

 from observations made every week, down to a depth of from four to six 

 feet, as we thought it necessary, and with the experiment station people 

 the question of fall or spring plowing has received some consideration. 

 That is a question that is far from being settled. We are running a test 

 of fall, early spring and late spring plowing, but for the present we will 

 need to consider only fall and spring plowing, plowed the same depth — 

 plowed in the fall, about the middle to the last of October, as compared 

 with spring plowing, as early as we can get onto it in April, which, 

 possibly, would be the fifth of April to about the first of May. We 

 worked along the line of moisture contents, yield of crop and organic 

 contents. We found in moisture contents that the area plowed late in 

 the spring would have about as much moisture in it as any of the areas. 

 The proposition of letting the stubble stand, not turning it under but 

 allowing it to stand to hold the snow so that it would melt and run di- 

 rectly into the soil — that idea has a place in the minds of some of the 

 dry farmers, thinking that to allow it to stand a little longer you will 

 really gain from the melting of the snows and treating of the soil more 

 than you would from early seeding. We found our moisture contents — we 

 had just about as good returns on our late spring plowing as we had on 

 any; that is, starting right in the spring early and making four de- 

 terminations' before it was complete. Of course the thing that interested 

 the farmer probably in the last season is crop yield. We found that on 

 our fall plowing that we cultivated early in the spring, for some reason 

 or other we got nine bushels of wheat to the acre more than we did 

 under any other kind of management. (Applause.) This may not be 

 borne out. l)Ut I was sinlplj^ telling you our results for one year. This 



