Weekly journal-miner., 1911-04-26

We KNOW that the man who raises a successful crop of corn in the East cultivates, and the man who does not cultivate does not raise a good crop. l am recommending the cultivation of all kinds of grain; in fact, all of my crops are cultivated.
 Many people have an idea that if
 you run a harrow or a weeder over growing grain, you will tear it out. Please take into consideration that the harrow which l recommend to
 use, or the weeder (which will be described later), are both made to get rid of weeds, and when your crop is up about five to six inches, and mas a good root system, you may run
 your harrow with sharp teeth set at an angle of forty-fve degrees, over
 your ground in any way. This gets
 rid of weeds, stimulates the growth of your crop and makes your ground so that it will hold moisture better and puts it in a more receptive con-
 dition for rain.
 Two gentlemen were out to my farm, last year, asking questions
 about cultivation of crops, and they
 inquired whether it was a fact that
 you could run a machine over a
 growing crop and not ruin it.
 ordered the man to hitch up to a
 weeder. machine twelve feet wide, somewhat like a hay rake. having
 three rows of steel teeth about the
 size of ones little finger, and ran it over my winter rye. when it was
 knee-high to the horses, proving what
 could be done with a machine IN GROWING GRAIN WITHOUT IN JURING IT.
 The great trouble with the aver
 age farmer, be he dry farmer or ir- rigatOr "wet farmer" is that he does not perceive that if he will do INTENSIVE rather than EXTEN- SIVE work it will pay better. You
 people have an illustration of that right here. As I came back from a
 drive this morning I noticed some market gardens, and the reason the ! average market garden man wins out 1 is because it is INTENSIVE work. In one of my talks at Carpenter. southeast of Cheyenne. I told the farmers that, although l was not physically able to do the work my
 self, yet I believed I could go out side the schOOlhOuse and raise a big ger crop on ten acres than they did on twenty acres.
 Government experts-men at the l Department in Washington, D. C., | have asserted, as stated before, that ! one cannot raise crops without at i least twenty inches of rainfall per
 annum. and today they will not acknowledge altogether that the new
 movement in dry farming can be
 successfully done because they make excuses that you have had an ex- | ceptional season.
 1 have raised crops at Cheyenne, where the altitude is 5000 feet and i the precipitation less than yours, from
 the year 1905 until last year
 i The precipitation comes there many times when you don't want it.
 and more often it dOesn t come when ! you do want it, the average being | l3.5 inches; the winters aI& dry and cold, and three years ago, with a pre- i cipitatiOn for eight months-tnat is to say, I sOwed some winter wheat
 in September, and including Septem-
 Der and the following seven months [ the government records show that . only one and One-half inches of i moisture fell. Yet, in spite of all ! this. l threshed thirty-fve bushels of ] winter wheat per acre, and the fol i lowing year seventeen bushels per
 acre, from ground that was never touched in the meantime. being a volunteer crop due to a heavy rain
 was harvesting the thirty-fve bushels
 per acre the year before. Outside
 of the winter wheat I threshed tnir- ty-four and One-half bushels of win ter rye in addition.
 Prof. B. C. Buffum, then at the | head of the Agricultural Department of Wyoming University, went out to see my crop and examine it. That
 was in April. And when he got in
 the buggy to go away he said he
 was a very disappointed man. I asked him what was the matter and
 he said: "YOur crop should be dead,
 but it is not. I mention this to show how little we really know of the possibilities of dry farming.
 You have greater precipitation here than I have in Wyoming. You
 have better soil than I have been farming in Wyoming. We have all kinds of soil there and so have you nere.
 I do not believe, ladies and gentle men, that you have the slightest con- eeption. the slightest idea, of your possibilities adjacent to this town, and want to tell you right now that if I did not think what I am saying to you l would not say so. | am not here to flatter you. I am here to tell you what my judgment dictates to me can be done in Yava- pal county.
 I am going to explain to you what I meant by saying that less moisture was required to mature crop in a hign altitude than is required in al low one. It is beyond question that all the lands in the arid and semi-arid states have what we might term superabundance of fertility. The reason that is so is because the