Moreover, many of the primitive peoples of to-day, the Chinese, Hindus, Mexicans, and the American Indians, are cultivating large areas of land by dry-farm methods, often highly perfected, which have been developed generations ago, and have been handed down to the present day.  Martin relates that the Tarahumari Indians of northern Chihuahua, who are among the most thriving aboriginal tribes of northern Mexico, till the soil by dry-farm methods and succeed in raising annually large quantities of corn and other crops.  A crop failure among them is very uncommon.  The early American explorers, especially the Catholic fathers, found occasional tribes in various parts of America cultivating the soil successfully without irrigation.  All this points to the high antiquity of agriculture without irrigation in arid and semiarid countries.

Modern dry-farming in the United States

The honor of having originated modern dry-farming belongs to the people of Utah.  On July 24th, 1847, Brigham Young with his band of pioneers entered Great Salt Lake Valley, and on that day ground was plowed, potatoes planted, and a tiny stream of water led from City Creek to cover this first farm.  The early endeavors of the Utah pioneers were devoted almost wholly to the construction of irrigation systems.  The parched desert ground appeared so different from the moist soils of Illinois and Iowa, which the pioneers had cultivated, as to make it seem impossible to produce crops without irrigation.  Still, as time wore on, inquiring minds considered the possibility of growing crops without irrigation; and occasionally when a farmer was deprived of his supply of irrigation water through the breaking of a canal or reservoir it was noticed by the community that in spite of the intense heat the plants grew and produced small yields.

Gradually the conviction grew upon the Utah pioneers that farming without irrigation was not an impossibility; but the small population were kept so busy with their small irrigated farms that no serious attempts at dry-farming were made during the first seven or eight years.  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.