Many of the dry-farm soils are of a heavy clay and become very
sticky during certain seasons of the year. In such soils the disk
plow is very useful. It is also true that dry-farm soils, subjected
to the intense heat of the western sun become very hard. In the
handling of such soils the disk plow has been found to be most
useful. The common experience of dry-farmers is that when sagebrush
lands have been the first plowing can be most successfully done with
the disk plow, but that after. the first crop has been harvested,
the stubble land can be best handled with the moldboard plow. All
this, however, is yet to be subjected to further tests.
While subsoiling results in a better storage reservoir for water and
consequently makes dry-farming more secure, yet the high cost of the
practice will probably never make it popular. Subsoiling is
accomplished in two ways: either by an ordinary moldboard plow which
follows the plow in the plow furrow and thus turns the soil to a
greater depth, or by some form of the ordinary subsoil plow. In
general, the subsoil plow is simply a vertical piece of cutting
iron, down to a depth of ten to eighteen inches, at the bottom of
which is fastened a triangular piece of iron like a shovel, which,
when pulled through the ground, tends to loosen the soil to the full
depth of the plow.
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