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Show PROGRESS OF DRY FARMING Those Who Followed Scientific Methods Meth-ods Last Year Had Good Crops Others Made Failures. (By W. C. PALMER, North Dakota.) The opposition to the name "Dry Farming" is dying out in North Dakota. Da-kota. The dry weather which characterized charac-terized the last crop year has been a good school master. Those who had followed the dry farming methods had good crops, while those who had not often did not have crop enough to be worth while cutting. It looked queer to see a field of grain on one field that would go 30 bushels per acre and the next one go four or five, both having had the same rainfall. It Is not hard to understand, though. The evaporation evapora-tion from a water surface is 30 Inches In the state during the spring and summer months. This is more than the rainfall for a whole year amounts to, which in the state varies from 15 to 24 Inches. To have any left for the crops it is plainly necessary to take steps to save the moisture. Those who had grown corn and potatoes, who had disked after cutting the' grain, who had summer fallowed, who had plowed under clover or added organic matter to the soil that is, where it had been done in accord with dry farming principles prin-ciples had from fair to very good crops this year. It Is generally conceded con-ceded that if there had been a two-inch two-inch rainfall at the critical time, good crops would have been assured all over the state. Ey cultivation, this could very easily have been saved, and more. too. At farmers' institutes there is more call for talks on dry farming than any other subject. The question often comes in this way: "What shall I do to be ready for a dry year?" While some real estate men are opposed to the term "dry farming," yet the putting Into practice of these principles is what will assure the farmer of a crop every year, at least as far as moisture i.s concerned. It is those who practiced dry farming methods last year that have demonstrated demon-strated what the state can do in a dry year. They have been the salt of the earth. |