as a safeguard or temporary expedient to guard against total loss of crop where extreme drouth is anticipated; that is, where the rainfall falls below the average.  He further explains that continuous grain cropping, even with careful plowing and spring and fall tillage, is unsuccessful; but holds that certain rotations of crops, including grain and a hoed crop every other year, are often more profitable than grain alternating with clean summer fallow.  He further believes that the fallow year every third or fourth year is sufficient for Great Plains conditions.  Jardine explains that whenever fall grain is grown in the Great Plains area, the fallow is remarkably helpful, and in fact because of the dry winters is practically indispensable.

This latter view is confirmed by the experimental results obtained by Atkinson and others at the Montana Experiment Stations, which are conducted under approximately Great Plains conditions.

It should be mentioned also that in Saskatchewan, in the north end of the Great Plains area, and which is characteristic, except for a lower annual temperature, of the whole area, and where dry-farming has been practiced for a quarter of a century, the clean summer fallow has come to be an established practice.

This recent discussion of the place of fallowing in the agriculture of the Great Plains area illustrates what has been said so often in this volume about the adapting of principles to local conditions.  Wherever the summer rainfall is sufficient to mature a crop, fallowing for the purpose of storing moisture in the soil is unnecessary; the only value of the fallow year under such conditions would be to set free fertility.  In the Great Plains area the rainfall is somewhat higher than elsewhere in the dry-farm territory and most of it comes in summer; and the summer precipitation is probably enough in average years to mature crops, providing soil conditions are favorable.  The main considerations, then, are to keep the soils open for the reception of water and to maintain the soils in a sufficiently fertile condition to produce, as explained in Chapter IX, plants with a minimum amount of water.  This is accomplished very largely by the year of hoed crop, when the soil is as well stirred as under a clean fallow.

The dry-farmer must never forget that the critical element in dry-farming is water and that the annual rainfall will in the very nature of things vary from year to year, with the result that the dry year, or the year with a precipitation below the average, is sure to come.  In somewhat wet years the moisture stored in the soil is of comparatively little consequence, but in a year of drouth it will be the main dependence of the farmer.  Now, whether a crop be hoed or not, it requires water for its growth, and land which is continuously cropped even with a variety of crops is likely to be so largely depleted of its moisture that, when the year of drouth comes, failure will probably result.