moisture penetration of 15 inches as contrasted to 11 inches on adjoining fields which had not been contoured.

TEXAS PANHANDLE

Typical of the soil and water conservation projects in the southern portion of the Plains is the one at Dalhart, in the northwestern corner of the Texas Panhandle. In an area of 47,175 acres near this town, the Soil Conservation Service and a group of cooperating farmers are demonstrating land-use principles and cultural practices designed to conserve water and protect the soil from wind erosion.

They are working under conditions generally typical of the Southern Plains. Ninety-five percent of the area is occupied by Amarillo sandy loam, Amarillo loam, Pullman silty loam, and Potter clay loam-soils which predominate in the Panhandle country. The land slopes very gently-gradients greater than three percent are rare. There are no streams; the area drains into shallow "wet weather lakes." Rainfall near Dalhart has averaged 18.03 inches for the past 30 years. Characteristically, winds are from a southwesterly direction, with an average velocity ranging from about 8 miles per hour during March, April, and May-the severe "blow season"-to about 6 miles per hour during the other months of the year. In the late winter and spring, however, individual winds sometimes attain a velocity of 30 miles an hour or more.

In the past, agricultural practices near Dalhart followed the pattern set throughout the Southern Plains. When the demonstration area was established in August 1934— less than three years ago—wheat and row crops largely had replaced the soil-protecting native grasses. Like their fellows elsewhere in the Southern Plains, farmers and stockmen of the area generally had failed to realize that the practice of grazing or burning the last stalk of stubble from cropped fields and the last blades of grass from pastures is an invitation to eventual soil destruction. And in the project area, as elsewhere through the Region, protracted drought had severe effects. In the summer of 1934, the land selected for the Dalhart project was in as critical a condition as any in the Great Plains (Figure 39).

Wind erosion had severely damaged 56 percent of the area. Some 11,200 acres of cultivated land had been badly hummocked by the accumulation of wind-driven sands in clumps of Russian thistle and other weeds; some 9,103 acres had lost from two to four inches of topsoil; another 2,500 acres had lost more than four inches of topsoil, some of it blown out to plow depth. Eight percent of the area, including one-fourth of the grass land, had been damaged by shifting sands.

Economic and social consequences of land mismanagement were commensurate with damage to the land itself. Some financial institutions had ceased to loan money for

the purchase of farm lands, and land values generally had suffered in accordance. Many tracts within the project area were not salable at any price, homes were abandoned, and health authorities reported an increase in respiratory diseases during the "blow" months of winter and spring. Men found it difficult to do a satisfactory day's work during blinding, choking dust storms. The picture was not a bright one, but it was no worse than the picture of the Southern Plains as a whole.

Today, soil still blows in the project area, and farming still is hazardous on unprotected land. But soil blows from far fewer fields, and the prospects of a crop are a good deal better than in 1934. Much more important is the confident attitude of the farmers in the area and the effect the work is having on farmers from outside who see in the project what sensible land use and reasonable concessions to nature can accomplish.

From the air, many of the transformations that have taken place on the land near Dalhart in the last three years would be quite evident. Then, the land below would have been a checkerboard of quadrangular fields planted solidly to single crops like wheat or sorghum. Now, in many places, the pattern would be curving strips (Figure 46), where solid planted fields have given way to strip crops planted on the contour. Some 10,000 acres nearly half the land involved in the demonstration—is strip cropped now. In August 1934, there was not a single strip cropped acre in the area.

Three years ago, the furrows in a cultivated field would have looked from the air like fine parallel lines running straight across the land. Today, many of those lines would curve along the gentle slope of the field, because on more than 12,000 acres crop rows now are plowed on the contour. Every acre in the area was plowed in straight rows when the work started, although contour tillage is one of the most effective methods of saving rainfall moisture and impeding the sweep of wind.

Heavier lines curving through the grass of pasture lands would be contour furrows, put there to catch rain-water and force it to penetrate the soil. Nearly 2,000 acres of pasture already have been contour furrowed. Not a single contour furrow existed in the area before the program got under way.

Today's air view of the area would reveal still heavier lines-more like bands-winding across the fields below. These would be dry land terraces, built on the contour and closed at both ends to trap all the rain and hold it on the land. End to end, the terraces built in the Dalhart project area since August 1934 would extend 460 miles. They conserve water and provide protection for 16,000 acres.

Less evident to the air observer but equally important from the standpoint of Plains agriculture would be other changes that have taken place in the project area near

Dalhart. On more than 3,300 acres, crops have changed from clean-tilled cash crops that provide little cover for the land, to grass or sudan or some other close-growing crop that protects the soil from the sweep of wind. Here and there somewhat surprisingly, on the Plains-young trees are thriving (Figure 31), giving promise of full growth and future land protection in the form of barriers against the wind. They have been planted carefully where the scant moisture concentrates in natural depressions or where the ingenuity of a land operator has caused it to concentrate. Cooperating farmers in the area no longer overgraze their stubble fields nor do they burn off the crop residues that anchor the soil during the windy months.

CASE RESULTS AT DALHART

The effectiveness of these new agricultural practices can be measured best by the results they have given. Cooperating in the Dalhart demonstration are 48 farmers owning a total of 28,000 acres of land.

One of them will harvest 1,000 pounds of headed milomaize this year from a field that was photographed only one year ago as the worst wind-blown tract in the area (Figure 47). This field was terraced in April 1936, and in May plowed along the contour. Late in May and early in June, 5.24 inches of rain fell. Held evenly on the land by the terraces and contoured furrows, the rain penetrated the soil below the normal depth of root growth. Since these spring rains, only 2.44 inches of effective moisture has fallen on the field, but the total, 7.68 inches, caught and forced into the soil, has been sufficient, even in a drought year, to produce a profitable grain crop (Figure 48). That same crop, of course, also will batten down the soil against the wind. It is the first time this field has produced a crop since 1933, and the first time since then that the "blow season" has found it covered with a protecting cloak of vegetation. Of the contour furrows and terraces, the owner says: "Not a drop of water ran off the field this year." That means all of it went into the soil, and water in the soil-even as little as 7 or 8 inches-means a crop. This field is not likely to be used again as an example of blown out land. Another cooperator in the Dalhart area for two years has farmed his land on the contour. In this year of drought he got a good crop of grain sorghum with only 8.71 inches of rain, which is only 56 percent of normal.

These farmers are only two of the 48 cooperators in the Dalhart demonstration. But what they have done is not exceptional-on the contrary, it is typical of the results obtained by all of the cooperators.

NORTHERN PLAINS

The first soil conservation demonstration in the northern sector of the Plains was established at Huron, Beadle

County, South Dakota, in February 1935. Comprising a total of 190,000 acres, the project is situated on the plains of the James River in the glacial drift section of the State.

Wind erosion is the principal immediate problem in the area. The most severe drought on record for the region was that of 1936, although in 1934 conditions were almost as bad. This has made emergency control measures for holding or stabilizing the soil—especially the loose sandy types—a pressing need.

Eight water conservation dams have been built in the area by Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees under the direction of the Soil Conservation Service. When the surface-water supply was augmented by springs or wells, some of these reservoirs supplied water for livestock and other purposes throughout the 1936 drought.

Eighty-five miles of contour furrows and approximately 17 miles of terraces have been constructed in the area. They were ready to catch the first winter snow early in November 1936-the first precipitation since February 1936. The snow melted within a fortnight, and almost all of the resulting water sank into the soil as storage for the next year's grass and crops.

The chief emergency control steps taken in the area have been rough tillage, mostly listing, and the production of emergency crop and feed cover, notably rye, cane and sudan grass.

This project also is only one of the 55 similar projects under way throughout the Plains Region. Comparable work has been done in four other areas in South Dakota, four in North Dakota, three in Montana, one in Wyoming, seven in Nebraska, twelve in Colorado, six in Kansas, six in Oklahoma, ten in Texas, and one in eastern New Mexico.

CONSERVATION ASSOCIATIONS

General interest in soil and water conservation has increased in the Great Plains Region as a direct result of the demonstration program of the Service. In the last year, fifty-three voluntary Soil Conservation Associations have been formed by farmers and ranchers of the Region to promote the adoption of better land-use practices through concerted community effort. Organized usually on a county basis, these Associations have memberships ranging from about 12 to as many as 400 landowners and operators. Their objective is to promote the conservation and better use of soil and water resources in the Great Plains.

The Bowman-Slope Association in North Dakota, with approximately fifty members representing some 40,000 acres of land, for example, has adopted a program calling for: (1) the construction of small dams on individual farms to enable the farmer to irrigate small tracts of land