Although these different dry-farm sections were developed independently, yet the methods which they have finally adopted are practically identical and include deep plowing, unless the subsoil is very lifeless; fall plowing; the planting of fall grain wherever fall plowing is possible; and clean summer fallowing.  About 1895 the word began to pass from mouth to mouth that probably nearly all the lands in the great arid and semiarid sections of the United States could be made to produce profitable crops without irrigation.  At first it was merely a whisper; then it was talked aloud, and before long became the great topic of conversation among the thousands who love the West and wish for its development.  Soon it became a National subject of discussion.  Immediately after the close of the nineteenth century the new awakening had been accomplished and dry-farming was moving onward to conquer the waste places of the earth.

H. W. Campbell

The history of the new awakening in dry-farming cannot well be written without a brief account of the work of H. W. Campbell who, in the public mind, has become intimately identified with the dry-farm movement.  H. W. Campbell came from Vermont to northern South Dakota in 1879, where in 1882 he harvested a banner crop,—­twelve thousand bushels of wheat from three hundred acres.  In 1883, on the same farm he failed completely.  This experience led him to a study of the conditions under which wheat and other crops may be produced in the Great Plains area.  A natural love for investigation and a dogged persistence have led him to give his life to a study of the agricultural problems of the Great Plains area.  He admits that his direct inspiration came from the work of Jethro Tull, who labored two hundred years ago, and his disciples.  He conceived early the idea that if the soil were packed near the bottom of the plow furrow, the moisture would be retained better and greater crop certainty would result.  For this purpose the first subsurface packer was invented in 1885.  Later, about 1895, when his ideas had crystallized into theories, he appeared as the publisher of Campbell’s “Soil Culture and Farm Journal.”  One page of each issue was devoted to a succinct statement of the “Campbell Method.”  It was in 1898 that the doctrine of summer tillage was begun to be investigated by him.

In view of the crop failures of the early ’90’s and the gradual dry-farm awakening of the later ’90’s, Campbell’s work was received with much interest.  He soon became identified with the efforts of the railroads to maintain demonstration farms for the benefit of intending settlers.  While Campbell has long been in the service of the railroads of the semiarid region, yet it should be said in all fairness that the railroads and Mr. Campbell have had for their primary object the determination of methods whereby the farmers could be made sure of successful crops.