Alfalfa, stock raising and dairying, afforestation, " dry-farming " and irrigation are, however, proving that the West can maintain prosperity by not relying upon ordinary agriculture.
In 1906 the farm area was almost equally divided between " dry " farming and farming under irrigation, three-fourths of the wheat produced was grown without irrigation, and the dry farming was very successful with the comparatively new and valuable crops of durum, or macaroni wheat, and Russian barley, which is used in straw for winter feed to sheep and neat cattle.
In some sections a system of dry-farming, by which the scanty rainfall is protected from evaporation by deep ploughing and mulching the soil, has proved profitable.
Alfalfa is not easily started, however, on the uplands of the extreme western part of the state; and dry-farming (the Campbell dust-mulch system) has the expensiveness in labour of intensive cultivation.
The counties where dry farming had been carried on on the largest scale were Missoula, Ravalli, Flathead, Cascade, Fergus and Gallatin, where cereal yields, though not nearly so large as from irrigated lands, were high compared with the average for the country.
