had ever used.

The few sodbreakers who had tried it thought they had found a way to
conserve the moisture and at the same time to preserve the land, but it
was not they who heralded the plan as a great new discovery. To them it
was a way to raise their own crops. They may have learned it in the Old
Country, where intensive farming was carried on, or, like Huey Dunn,
figured it out for themselves. But it was ahead of the times in the new
West and generally looked upon as an impractical idea spread largely by
land agents as propaganda. Many of the farmers had never heard of it.
What I had heard and read of fallowing now came back to mind. I was in a
position to keep better posted on such things than they.

I got out my letters and records and spread them before Ida Mary on the
old square table, and with the sweat dripping down our faces from the
heat of the lamp we eagerly devoured their contents. Huey Dunn's plan of
mellowing, or rotting the soil, was not yet the true fallowing method.

"But it will mean cropping the land only every other year, and plowing
and raking the empty soil," Ida Mary said in a tone of misgiving.

"The top soil is kept loosened so that every bit of moisture will be
absorbed into the subsoil. Suppose it does mean letting the land lie
idle every other year, alternating the fields," I contended. "There is
plenty of cheap land here. It will be a way to utilize waste space."
Farmers in other arid regions, I learned as I scanned the letters, were
raising forage crops on the land in the off year.

But it will take two years, Ida Mary reminded me. The settlers had no
money to wait so long for a crop. "And all that labor--" she went on.
"It may be the solution, but I doubt if the settlers would listen to any
such plan."

I knew she was right. Two years of waiting, labor and expense. Labor was
no small item with the poor homesteaders. If the government would put in
money to carry out this new system until the farmers could get returns
from it--"It is a gigantic project for the government to finance ... it
would require great financial corporations to develop this country ..."
Halbert Donovan had said.

I talked it over with some of the more experienced farmers on the Strip
who understood the processes required. They figured they could plant
part of the ground while the other lay fallowing. If it happened to be a
wet year, that would give them something to go on. "But, mein Gott, how
we goin' to pu