The publications of those days indicate that
dry-farming must have been practiced occasionally as early as 1854
or 1855.
About 1863 the first dry-farm experiment of any consequence occurred
in Utah. A number of emigrants of Scandinavian descent had settled
in what is now known as Bear River City, and had turned upon their
farms the alkali water of Malad Creek, and naturally the crops
failed. In desperation the starving settlers plowed up the sagebrush
land, planted grain, and awaited results. To their surprise, fair
yields of grain were obtained, and since that day dry-farming has
been an established practice in that portion of the Great Salt Lake
Valley. A year or two later, Christopher Layton, a pioneer who
helped to build both Utah and Arizona, plowed up land on the famous
Sand Ridge between Salt Lake City and Ogden and demonstrated that
dry-farm wheat could be grown successfully on the deep sandy soil
which the pioneers had held to be worthless for agricultural
purposes. Since that day the Sand Ridge has been famous as a
dry-farm district, and Major J. W. Powell, who saw the ripened
fields of grain in the hot dry sand, was moved upon to make special
mention of them in his volume on the "Arid Lands of Utah," published
in 1879.
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