An airplane sows grass seed on the range near Arbon, 1938

Late in 1938 a Pocatello pilot, Ralph Knapp, sowed grass seed from an airplane over 8,000 acres of rough range between Arbon and Rockland in Power County; Rockland lies in the neighboring valley to the west. It is the earliest account of seeding from the air near the valley that this site has found. Two newspaper pieces took note of it: an Associated Press story that December, and a Forest Service article on range reseeding fourteen months later.

The Associated Press sent the story out from Pocatello on December 8, 1938, and the Ogden Standard-Examiner printed it the same day under the headline "Planting From Air is Newest Farm Wrinkle." Knapp said he had just finished what he called one of his "strangest assignments." A helper poured seed into a hopper rigged up for the job, and Knapp flew low over the land, spreading 2,500 pounds of seed in five hours. The story presented the work "as a soil conservation and livestock feed measure."

The seed was crested wheatgrass. Carl Rudeen, who leased the land, said that it made "a hardy clump grass good for stock forage," needed little moisture or soil, and took hold readily on rocky ground. He also said that it had once taken two weeks to sow just 800 acres from horseback. The same grass had been tried in the valley on a much smaller scale: in the spring of 1936 the county agent seeded a crested-wheatgrass demonstration plot on Walt Hayden's farm, and Walt harvested crested wheatgrass in 1938, as the Hayden family history records.

The man who leased the land

The 1938 story says only that Carl Rudeen leased the land. It does not say who owned it or exactly where it lay. The papers do show a Carl Rudeen farming in this part of Idaho from 1909 through the 1920s. He is probably the same man, though no article says so.

That Carl Rudeen, of American Falls, made a homestead entry on land south of American Falls on June 7, 1909. In 1914 he gave notice of his final proof, the last step in "proving up," when a homesteader showed that he had lived on and farmed his claim and could receive title. By 1917 he was also farming land on the Fort Hall Reservation, which borders Arbon Valley on the north. The American Falls Press reported that August:

Carl Rudeen came in Tuesday evening from the reservation for a load of sacks. He commenced threshing his Gold Coin wheat crop Tuesday morning on the section of land he leases on the reservation.

In 1925 the same paper described a blade weeder that Rudeen, "Power county farmer," had patented after four years of experimenting. "Eight horses pull a five section weeder 30 feet wide," it explained. In March 1927 he was on the original committee of Arbon Valley wheat growers, with Ed England, William Allard, T. H. Hill and J. H. Keeler, who met at Pocatello to talk about building or buying a community warehouse for their wheat. In February 1930 an organizing committee of Arbon Valley farmers included a "Carl Ru-", the rest of the name lost in the surviving text; he was probably Rudeen. By 1940 he was described as Carl Rudeen of Pocatello.

What the range scientists thought

On February 4, 1940, the Ogden Standard-Examiner ran a long article on reseeding depleted range across the Intermountain country, written by George Stewart and C. Kenneth Pearse of the Forest Service's Intermountain Forest and Range Experiment Station. One of its photographs showed an abandoned dry farm, one of hundreds in the region, the caption said, where only weeds now grew.

Partway through, the writers turned to the seeding near Arbon. Research workers, they wrote, were "watching with interest" the airplane seeding of 8,000 acres of Power County land near Arbon by Carl Rudeen of Pocatello. They judged it very light. By their estimate only about 2,000 pounds of seed had been used, where 40,000 pounds or more would have been the recommended amount for that much land. That works out to about a quarter of a pound an acre, against the five pounds or more an acre that their figure implies.

The article, which carried the subheading "Airplane Inadvisable," was cautious about the airplane in general. The writers said that the airplane had drawn much publicity as a way to scatter seed over the range, but that until more was known, success would be a matter of chance unless the seed could be covered. Seed left uncovered, they wrote, had been one of the main causes of failure in early attempts. Successful plantings, they reported, had been made with drills or other intensive methods, at $2.40 to $6 an acre for seed and planting together. The columns of this page run together in the digitized text, so the wording and figures given here from the 1940 article, for the seed and for the costs, are pieced together from fragments, and the printed page may differ in detail.

What is not known

The two accounts differ in small ways. The 1938 story put the seed at 2,500 pounds; the 1940 article estimated about 2,000. The first placed the land between Arbon and Rockland, the second simply near Arbon. Neither says who owned the range or names the helper who poured the seed. No later report has turned up to say whether the grass came up.

The story as reported

Ogden Standard-Examiner, December 8, 1938, page 3. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

POCATELLO, Idaho — Rangeland in Power County has been seeded with wheatgrass from an airplane, the Associated Press reported Thursday, with the aim of holding the soil and raising feed for livestock.

The flying was done by Ralph Knapp, a Pocatello pilot, who said Thursday that the work was now finished and that few jobs he had taken on were stranger. The tract, 8,000 acres of rough grazing land, sits in Power County with Arbon on one side and Rockland on the other.

A helper kept a makeshift hopper filled with seed while Knapp held the plane close to the ground. Five hours of that work put down 2,500 pounds of seed.

Carl Rudeen, who held the lease on the tract, compared the flight with the old method: a mere 800 acres sown on horseback, he said, used to be two weeks' work.

The seed was crested wheatgrass. According to Rudeen, it comes up as a tough, clumping grass that stock graze well, gets by on little water and thin soil, and holds fast on rocky ground.

On this site: the first airplane over the valley, a mail plane in 1929; the Hayden family and their crested-wheatgrass trials; and Pauline and West Fork, at the reservation's edge.