In the fall of 1950 the wheat ground on LeRoy Lindley's farm, on the east side of Arbon Valley, was striped across the hill in long bands. When photographs of them appeared in a Pocatello Sunday paper on November 19, 1950, the caption said nothing like them had yet been tried in the area. The story behind them had begun two years earlier, when Power County farmers voted to form a soil conservation district.
A district for Power County, 1948–1949
On Saturday, September 25, 1948, landowners inside the boundaries of a proposed Power County soil conservation district went to the polls to choose three supervisors. Ballots were taken at the Pauline school in Arbon Valley, the Rockland school and the courthouse at American Falls. Any landowner in the district could vote, and where a farm was community property, husband and wife could each vote. The Pocatello Tribune listed five candidates, all nominated by petition: Ben B. Hull of Rockland, Gene T. Allen and LeRoy Lindley of Arbon, and C. W. Coon and Ernest L. Permann of American Falls. The state soil conservation commission had already appointed two supervisors earlier that year. The Tribune described the board's job: to look at each farm's soil and water problems one by one, then work out with specialists a plan its owner could put into practice.
Late in October, the Tribune reported on November 3, the new members met with the appointed ones and organized as a board. LeRoy Lindley of Arbon was named chairman, Ivan Wolverton of Fairview vice-chairman, and Sterling Schow, the county agricultural agent, secretary. Fred Tiede, Ben B. Hull and Ernest L. Permann made up the rest. The paper did not say which members had been elected and which appointed, but since Lindley, Hull and Permann had been on the ballot and Wolverton and Tiede had not, the three were probably the elected members. The board set its regular meetings for the second Monday of each month at the Power County courthouse and planned to send all its members to the state supervisors' convention at Weiser in November.
That was the winter of 1948–49, which the valley remembers as a hard one. Some farmers had missed that winter's planning sessions, and on Monday, March 14, 1949, the supervisors sat down with George C. Welch, the district soil conservationist from Boise, to arrange further meetings for them. According to Schow, the board wanted to find out what each farm needed and then plan the work to fix it. The Tribune added that the district would get its own soil technician only after its program was clear and the supervisors reported that travel was practical. Lindley was there for Arbon, with Wolverton, Tiede, Permann and Hull.
Strips on the east slope, 1950
The Idaho Sunday Journal, the Sunday edition of the Idaho State Journal, led its soil conservation section of November 19, 1950, with Lindley's farm; its report is retold in our own words below. It called him chairman of the district board, but a photograph on the same page of the board at American Falls named Irvin Moss as chairman, so the papers do not settle who held the post that fall.
The paper places the farm only on the valley's east slope. The Lindley family's homesteads, patented between 1914 and 1922, lay on that side, about seven miles south-east of Arbon, but it does not say the strips were on that land. The family research behind this site identifies LeRoy as LeRoy C. Lindley (1916–1988), the son of Roy D. Lindley, who homesteaded there, served as a Power County commissioner from about 1929 to 1935, and was very probably the Roy Lindley of Arbon who protested when Idaho called off its drive against the golden eagle in 1937. The identification is very probable rather than certain, since the newspaper does not name LeRoy's father. LeRoy had just been elected a county commissioner himself in November 1950, and he was a Power County commissioner in June 1969 as well.
What came after
The papers read for this post do not say how the strips held up, or whether the neighbor who joked about them tried strips of his own. Others in the district did. By March 1952 the district reported 2,137 acres of strip cropping laid out in two years, and Ross Saxton of the Crystal–Arbon area had most of his farm in strips, as told in Contour strips and hillside combines on Arbon's slopes. The chairman by then was a supervisor the 1952 paper called only Tiede, probably the Fred Tiede of the 1948 board.
The washing did not stop with them. On November 12, 1978, the Idaho State Journal's farm page carried a Soil Conservation Service photograph of resource conservationist Marlowe Freckleton looking over an eroded slope near the head of Snake Creek in Arbon Valley. That slope, the caption said, had lost 70 tons of soil an acre. In a column on the same page, Larry Gearhart of the Soil Conservation Service put the time nature needs to build a single inch of topsoil in this dry country at up to 1,500 years.
On this site: the Lindleys among the land-record families of the Arbon area, Roy Lindley in the valley's line of county commissioners, and the older dry-farm practice of summer fallow.
The story as reported
Idaho Sunday Journal, November 19, 1950, page 21. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
AMERICAN FALLS — In 1950 LeRoy Lindley, an Arbon Valley wheat grower on the Power County soil conservation board, laid out strip crops on his own land so he could see whether they worked before telling his neighbors to try them.
Lindley farmed the eastern side of the valley, and his wheat ground climbed the hill until it grew too steep to work. The paper said most growers in Arbon Valley faced the same three troubles he did. The first was in the grain itself: protein had fallen off, and from one year to the next he could not count on the yield. The second was the dirt that rain carried off his slopes, which had piled up on the road and covered his fences. The third was a network of gullies that widened with each season and made it harder and harder to move machinery from one part of a field to another.
By fall some 530 acres lay in strips. The first 200 acres went in during June, when Lindley plowed bands that measured from 100 to 140 feet across. Once the crop was off he laid out another 330 acres, pulling sweeps over the stubble to throw up small ridges that ran along the hillside instead of down it. His goal was to have all 1,000 acres on contour strips eventually. The layout also promised to make harvest easier. Because the strips followed the lay of the hill, he figured a combine could run nearly three miles before it had to turn, which would cut his fuel use considerably.
He did not plan to stop with strips. Along with the contour tillage and mulching that went with them, he intended to turn some strips over to grass, sown with alfalfa or sweet clover, to build the soil back up. Gullies he could not smooth away were to become grassed channels for runoff, with their sides shaped low enough for machinery to cross.
In the paper's pictures, the strips alternated in wide bands up the face of the slope. How wide each one ran was set by the steepness of the ground, and the aim was to catch runoff partway down the hill before it gathered enough force to cut a gully. According to the paper, contour strips had never been tried in the area before, and neighboring farmers were keeping an eye on the results.
A neighbor from across the valley gave Lindley, fresh from winning election as county commissioner, something to laugh about. The striped hillside, the man told him, "makes me dizzy," though he promised that "by golly, I'll try it myself!" if the method paid.
Sources
- Idaho Sunday Journal, November 19, 1950, page 21
- Pocatello Tribune, September 27, 1948, page 6
- Pocatello Tribune, November 3, 1948, page 9
- Pocatello Tribune, March 17, 1949, page 3
- Deseret News, March 22, 1952, page 21
- Idaho State Journal, June 18, 1969, page 8
- Idaho State Journal, November 12, 1978, page 42