dry farming

Farming without irrigation, using techniques which conserve water for the crop. Strategies include mulching, frequent fallowing, working the soil to a fine tilth, and frequent weeding.

Dry Farming refers to agricultural operations without irrigation in a climate with a moisture deficiency, usually places with an annual rainfall of less than 20 inches. It involves raising drought-resistant or drought-evasive crops (that is, crops that mature in late spring or fall) and makes the best use of a limited water supply by maintaining good surface conditions—loosening the soil so that water may enter easily and weeding so that the moisture is better utilized.

In the United States, dry-farming techniques evolved through experiments conducted more or less independently where settlements were established in locations with little precipitation. During the early part of the 1850s, for example, Americans in California began to raise crops such as winter Wheat, whose principal growing season coincided with the winter rainfall season. By 1863, settlers in Utah extensively and successfully practiced dry farming techniques. In some interior valleys of the Pacific Northwest, dry farming was reported before 1880. In the Great Plains, with its summer rainfall season, adaptation to dry farming methods accompanied the small-farmer invasion of the late 1880s and later. Experimental work for the Kansas Pacific Railroad had begun near the ninety-eighth meridian by R. S. Elliott between 1870 and 1873.

On the northern Great Plains, H. W. Campbell carried on private experiments that attracted the attention and support of railroad interests, resulting in the formulation of much of his system of dry farming by 1895. The state agricultural experiment stations of the Great Plains inaugurated experimental activities under government auspices soon after their foundation, and the federal Department of Agriculture created the Office of Dry Land Agriculture in 1905. Once inaugurated, development of dry farming was continuous in the Great Plains proper, but the drought cycles of the 1930s intensified experimental work and the invention of machinery for special soil-culture processes both in the Plains and in the transitional subhumid country where it was neglected during wet periods.

The net income result per hour of labor in dry farming is high, but so are the fixed costs (because of special implements required). In addition, the risk of failure is higher than in traditional farming.

Bibliography

Hargreaves, Mary Wilma M. Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains, 1900–1925. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957.

———. Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains, 1920–1990: Years of Readjustment. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993.

Wessel, Thomas R., ed. Agriculture in the Great Plains. Washington, D.C.: Agricultural History Society, 1977.

Widtsoe, John A. Dry Farming. New York: Macmillan, 1911.

—James C. Malin/C. W.