illarity at the top is our foe and must be killed dead.

It is interesting to remark that, in the main, the same culture processes which assist percolation or the jugging of water also act favorably, helping capillarity below, breaking it at the top. At any rate no act which furthers the jugging hinders the retention, and vice versa.

You therefore double-disk in the spring as early as snow and frost are gone. Plow pretty soon after, deep if the soil is heavy, and deep every third year even if the soil is light. Then go over the ground with the sub-surface packer, an arrangement of 18 or 20 sharp-edged wheels rolling parallel to each other, pressing the soil partly downward and partly sidewise, so as to crush all crusts and lumps and fill all hollow spaces at the bottom of furrows or elsewhere, making the soil firm while porous. A roller and then a light harrow immediately follow, the same day at any rate, and, if hot or windy, the same hour. From this moment on, at frequent intervals, and especially

forthwith after every rain, harrowing or cultivating must be incessant, not only to mulch the top soil, interrupting capillarity, but also to kill all weeds, for weeds perniciously use up your precious moisture as well as the nutrition needed by your crop.

The above are the absolutely essential principles of the dry-culture system. There is another consideration which, though subordinate, is of no small importance. I refer to the creation and maintenance of humus in the soil. Humus is immensely valuable as a holder of moisture. It is a sort of sponge, taking in water and retaining it.

Normal prairie is rich in humus. This is why it will carry crops through a drouth that would be fatal to them on older soils. For centuries the grasses on our great prairies grew up and died annually. The dead grass partly rotted where it fell and rains washed it into the earth, where the decomposition was completed. Roots, too, died from time to time and decayed. This is the way the primitive humus of the plains was formed, a provision of Nature for massing

water for use by plants in dry times. We are to conserve this provision and to increase it so far as possible.

Humus is, of course, invaluable, practically indispensable, as an agent of fertility. The fertilizing mineral elements of the soil are not directly available for plant nutrition, but must be first taken up and transmuted by the acids of the humus into soil foods, humus being, as it were, a bridge from the mineral ingredients of the soil to the organic portion usable as nutriment.

Every effort to produce and conserve humus would therefore be in place were fertility the only concern, but such effort is doubly necessary in semi-arid cultivation where moisture is so beyond price. Humus also binds the soil together, acting as a prophylactic against the wind, preventing its blowing away the best part of your ground.

Manure of any sort mixed with the soil and decomposed forms humus-better when supplementing plowed-under grass, clover or alfalfa. The humus-making value of these forages is immense-far beyond what

most farmers appreciate. Even if your crop returns are regular and good, a pretty frequent seeding to clover or alfalfa is desirable and will in the end prove indispensable.

I have thus laid down, as completely as I could in a brief space, the fundamentals of the dry-culture system. Much further discussion of it is possible; details could be given; criticisms, queries and replies attempted. I myself have a few further suggestions to offer.

I pause at this point, however, to remark that whether or not the system is as deserving as its foremost advocates claim, whether its future is to be dazzingly luminous or only ordinary day, it is certainly deserving and it certainly has a future. I say this absolutely without prejudice. I have not a cent's worth of financial interest, direct or indirect, in the plan.

A further remark of the utmost significance relating both to the irrigation and to the dry-culture sections of our country is here in place: that agriculture under these

conditions is some day to be the typical and most successful of all agriculture. No overwet seasons or periods occur, such as in humid areas destroy crops outright or ruin their quality. Harvest weeks are sunny enough for the work. Farming loses its gambling aspect as much as manufacturing. This feature will enable rural pursuits to command and retain first-class talent to a greater extent than is now the case.

Critics maintain that dry culture is costly -expensive in human labor and in team. power. Friends admit this. It costs more to farm as above described than it does to farm in the usual way. But, friends add, and I think them perfectly right, the extra returns assured by the method outlined will vastly more than pay for the extra expense.

As a matter of fact nearly all the procedure demanded by dry farming is desirable and would be remunerative under plentiful rainfall. There is, however, hardly a section of our Union where the farmer can be sure, any given season, of sufficient moisture from above, whereas, if he has plenty in the