DRY FARMING CONGRESS. 



165 



almost bewildered as to what to say as to the size of a dry farm, and I 

 have been attempting to kind of gather my senses, also to know whether 

 I have been figuring right for the last eighteen years or not. When I hear 

 the statements that have been made and of the great successes that have 

 been obtained by methods that have been in use, and the enormous yields 

 and vast amounts of money that can be made in dry farming I am almost 

 staggered, and feel that I have lost almost half of my life in not finding 

 out these things before. ' (Applause.) It puts me in mind, a little, of the 

 fellow that was going into the poultry business. He had about a dozen 

 hens and had an idea he could make money out of the poultry business, 

 so he began figuring, and began taking poultry magazines, and he was en- 

 abled to figure in a very short time that there would not be room upon 

 the face of the earth for his chickens, after a few successfail years, 

 (Laughter) because of the many cMckens that he could, hatch. And 

 when he came to compute the production of those chickens there was no 

 place on the earth for them, and so he backed out and didn't go into the 

 chicken business. (Laughter.) 



I am a little of the opinion that many of the dry farmers who are con- 

 templating filing on these lands and working for a living will be disap- 

 pointed in many respects, at least. I have been, in some respects, and I 

 will say that I have not been able to reach the success that many have 

 reached along this line, yet I feel perfectly satisfied with dry farming and 

 feel that it is the best business we have ever gotten into, and I am not 

 very anxious to get out of it. But I hope the soils will be still productive 

 in the future, and by meeting in this Congress and exchanging ideas that 

 we may use the very best methods that are within our reach and profit 

 by them. 



I presume if we were to ask Prof. Merrill what the size of a dry 

 farm should be he would say nothing less than eight thousand acres. I 

 may ask some one else and they would say, perhaps, forty or fifty acres. 

 So you will see there is a diversity of opinion in regard to this matter, 

 and perhaps I shall be criticised when I tell you what I think the size of 

 a dry farm ought to be. Of course it depends altogether on the conditions. 

 If I am going to run a dry farm merely for what I can do on that farm, 

 with one pair of hands, and take all of my time, and work it to the very 

 best advantage there is a certain limit, but if I have half a dozen boys 

 * growing up that have got two hands, the same as I have, each of them, 

 then I would have to view that matter from a different standpoint, because 

 I would need more land to accommodate them. But I take it the average 

 man in the community wants to know what he can do with his hands and 

 be employed practically the year around and have all that he can do and 

 all of the land he can use under the very best conditions that come to him 

 during the season. That, I think, is the important point, because I be- 

 lieve eight-tenths, at least, of the men who contemplate following dry 

 farming as a livelihood do not want a thousand acres, or even five hundred 

 acres to work upon, but, as I stated, they want all that they can put their 

 time to good use on during the season. Now the capacity of the man has 



