THE DRY FARMING CONGRESS. 



335 



2. CONGRESSMAN MONDELL'S EXPERIENCE IN DRY 



FARMING. 



(The following personal experience was related at a fall festival held 

 in Pine Bluffs, Wyo., 1908. Because of its helpful suggestions, your 

 Statistician feels this personal experience of the author of our 320-acre 

 homestead bill, has a place here.) 



"My first experience as a dry farmer was obtained as a boy more 

 years ago than I care to tell on a farm in Northwestern Iowa. We did 

 not have a patented name for it at that time. We simply called it a droutli 

 and, as we had not learned how to farm for dry years, we were compelled 

 to live on what we had left over from the year before and our hopes for 

 the year to come. A few years later we had the historic visitation of 

 grasshoppers and that was the driest farming I have ever known. I 

 refer to that experience for the reason that during the five years that 

 the "hoppers" were with us more or less. I learned some things about 

 crops which were quick maturing and the early seeding and the forcing of 

 crops that was of considerable value to my later experience in Wyoming. 



"Twenty-one years ago next month I took up my permanent resi- 

 dence in Wyoming, in Weston county, about five miles from where the 

 town of Newcastle now stands. The need of grain and vegetables which 

 could not be secured nearer than fifty miles and then in uncertain quan- 

 tities suggesed the advisability of growing them, and the absence of 

 water for irrigation compelled the experiment of growing what we need- 

 ed with the natural rainfall and so I became a Wyoming dry farmer 

 twenty years ago. 



My dry farming at that time continued for a number of years, dur- 

 ing which time I gradually increased the acreage until I farmed over a 

 thousand acres and raised over twenty thousand bushels of grain and 

 over twenty-five hundred bushels of potatoes, sixteen years ago this 

 season. 



Of course we did not call it dry farming, neither had we heard of 

 the "Campbell system" or the biennial system of the Columbia River 

 Uplands, still we did very well on a thin soil and with about fourteen 

 inches of rainfall by simply doing very good farming and at the right 

 time. We would do even better now under the same circumstances, for 

 we have learned many things from those who have been the pioneers 

 and pathfinders in the science of dry farming. 



We have now up there in Crook and Weston counties an extensive 

 territory in which farming is carried on and in which reasonably good 

 crops have been grown by the majority of the farmers for the past ten 

 or twelve years, while those who have farmed the best have been re- 

 warded with phenomenal crops most of the time and good crops all 

 the time. 



The country up there differs considerably from your country here. It 

 is more hilly and broken and there is a greater variety of soil. Also in 

 the sections most extensively farmed a heavier snowfall. Recently, how- 

 ever, the settlement is extending into a region of open prairie more like 

 yours. 



