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Updated: June 3, 2025
The hot winds which could undo a whole season's hard work in a day are seldom heard of now. Kansas is no longer in the semi-arid region. It is one of the most productive states in the Union, and this has come, not by dry-farming, but by the cultivation of the soil and by the planting of trees.
In Greece to-day the goats are now destroying the last vestiges of the forests. I venture the prediction that the sheep industry on naturally semi-arid lands is doomed; that the future feeding of both sheep and cattle will be on irrigated lands, and that the forests will be carefully guarded by State and Nature as natural reservoirs.
Western Canada, a large part of Australia, the Kalahari Desert of Africa, and many parts of Asia, which are all semi-arid, will in time become productive instead of barren. It must be remarked that the grains of the East could not withstand the severe winters in a large part of the Northwest, so the Department of Agriculture sent men all over the world to find drought-and-cold-resisting grains.
Equipped with pack animals for the trails, and conducted by a guide who knows the position of the springs, one might wander for months over this rugged and semi-arid region without becoming weary of the wonderful sights which Nature has prepared.
While going through these mountains last summer and reflecting upon the prodigious changes which the sheep have brought about in a few years, it occurred to me that we must look to Oriental countries in order to see the final results of sheep and goat grazing in semi-arid climates.
It was from Chelan that we were to make our start. Long before we arrived, Dan Devore and the packers were getting the outfit ready. Yet the first glimpse of Chelan was not attractive. We had motored half a day through that curious, semi-arid country, which, when irrigated, proves the greatest of all soils in the world for fruit-raising.
The community of which the green Martians with whom my lot was cast formed a part was composed of some thirty thousand souls. They roamed an enormous tract of arid and semi-arid land between forty and eighty degrees south latitude, and bounded on the east and west by two large fertile tracts.
Yet there were hundreds of thousands of acres that could not be irrigated for lack of water, and the problem of finding a use for these barren, semi-arid lands remained unsolved for many years.
These results are particularly vital in the development of plants adapted by selection for semi-arid agriculture.
The semi-arid regions can only support a reasonable population under conditions of the strictest economy and wisdom in the use of the water supply, and in addition to their other economic uses the forests are indispensably necessary for the preservation of the water supply and for rendering possible its useful distribution throughout the proper seasons.
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