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<br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br />I <br /> <br />002253 <br /> <br />irrigation was wheat, and it remained so for many years. The <br />popular variety has been the hard red winter wheat, first intro- <br />duced to Texas in 1833 and firmly established as the principal <br />dry1and crop throughout the High Plains by 1875. Ideal for <br />milling into bakery flour, this crop is both drought resistant and <br />disease resistant, besides being a fall-winter grazing crop for <br />cattle before maturing to harvest in the spring. <br />In the years before irrigation, Hale County was noted for <br />both cotton and wheat production. The County shifted out of cattle <br />and sheep ranching somewhat earlier and to a 9reater extent than <br />did counties further to the south. Early records are sketchy, but <br />Table IV-1 below indicates more or less typical cotton and wheat <br />production for the South Plains counties in the dry1and farming <br />years just prior to the great expansion into irrigation. The <br />acreages, yields, and production figures are indicative of the <br />dry1and years before improvement in varieties and in applications <br />of better fertilizers and pesticides, so they are not necessarily <br />a mirror image of what might happen in transition back to dry1and <br />conditions in the future. Note also however the sharp variations <br />by years, due primarily to rainfall. The extended drought of the <br />1930s shows up rather dramatically in yields. <br />As noted in later sections, production of these two major <br />crops shifted dramatically, beginning in 1946, with widespread <br />adoption and acceleration of irrigation farming, and even <br />before the adoption of irrigation the area's major crop in the <br />early 19405 became grain sorghums. While first grown much later <br /> <br />IV-7 <br /> <br />An~rDU"k~c <br />