Contour strips and hillside combines on Arbon's slopes, 1952–1965

Arbon Valley's dry farmers worked the hills as well as the valley floor. Between 1952 and 1965, three kinds of report about that hill ground reached the papers: a farm item on contour strips in the Crystal–Arbon area, an advertisement that quoted two Arbon farmers on harvesting slopes, and the news of a fatal accident on a steep grade.

Strips on the contour, 1952

On March 22, 1952, the Deseret News of Salt Lake City printed a short farm report from American Falls. Power County dry farmers, it said, were finding strip cropping not as hard as it looked. Contour strip cropping meant laying fields out in long strips that follow the lay of a slope, so the work runs around the hill instead of straight up and down it. The report's example was Ross Saxton, whom it called one of the first to take up contour farming. He told the paper he rather enjoyed it. "There is no shifting of gears to go up the hills," he said, and he could cover as many acres as before he laid out the strips, if not more.

Practically all of Saxton's 662-acre farm was in strips. He invited visitors to come to Arbon the next spring and see how well the practice held moisture and controlled erosion. A photograph with the report showed his strips, and its caption placed them in the Crystal–Arbon farm area near American Falls. Tiede, the chairman of the Power Soil Conservation District's board of supervisors (the paper gave only the surname), said 2,137 acres of strip cropping had been laid out in the district in the past two years. Archibald, the Soil Conservation Service representative, expected contour strips in Rockland Valley the next spring and said that farmers in Pleasant Valley and south of American Falls planned strips of their own.

Ross Saxton was probably the man the Salt Lake Tribune had called a "rancher at Rattlesnake" three years earlier. During a storm in February 1949, in the hard winter of 1948–49, he skied nine miles to the Garden Creek gap, on his way to McCammon. Snowed in there, he telephoned McCammon that about sixty families in his area had gone three weeks without new supplies. Rattlesnake Creek is one of the two main creeks of the Crystal basin.

Saving moisture was an old concern in the valley. Its dry farmers had long rested fields in summer fallow for a year to store moisture. The strips were a newer way to keep that moisture, and the soil with it, on the slopes.

A grain saver for the hillsides, 1960

Harvest brought its own trouble on a slope. In July 1960 the Zollinger Manufacturing Company of Logan ran an advertisement in the Logan Herald Journal for its Hillside Grain Saver, which it said solved the difficulties of threshing on hillsides. Fitted to a combine, the device skimmed the threshed material from the low side of the grain pan and threw it onto the uphill side of the screen. That spread the material evenly, so the fan could blow off the chaff and the grain could fall through, with more of the crop going into the bin instead of onto the ground. The ad's photograph showed a John Deere 95 fitted with a saver that, the caption said, "did a good job even on hillsides this steep."

The ad quoted several satisfied customers, two of them from Arbon. George H. Perry said that the saver cost so little beside a self-leveling combine, a machine built to keep itself level on a slope, that he could never justify buying one, even at a third of its price. David L. Bird thanked the company for "what your invention has meant to me in dollars and cents." The other testimonials came from Downey, Logan and Cache Junction.

The David L. Bird of the ad was probably the man of that name, a son of Matthew F. and Louise Perry Bird. His 1997 obituary said he spent most of his youth on the family farm in Arbon Valley, moved back to the valley for good in 1973, and served ten years as president of the Arbon Valley LDS Branch. A Bird family was among the early homesteaders of Buist, and his was probably that family. The ad gives nothing about George H. Perry beyond his name and town.

A combine on a steep grade, 1965

Harvesting the slopes could also be dangerous. On Friday, September 24, 1965, Richard Sorensen Christensen, 47, a dry farmer from Brigham City, Utah, was killed in Arbon Valley when the combine he was running tipped over on a hill and rolled onto him. According to the Box Elder Journal, he had come up that morning to cut grain for a Brigham City friend and had then moved on to a neighboring farm owned by a Crystal man. The paper said he was turning the combine around on the hill when it went over.

Power County sheriff's deputies, in a wire report printed in the Logan Herald Journal on September 26, said the combine's leveling mechanism had apparently failed as it turned on a steep downgrade. The Tremonton Leader said the machine had "failed to adjust mechanically to the contour of the hill." The Brigham City paper did not mention a failure. He left his wife, a daughter and two sons.

The story as reported

Deseret News, March 22, 1952, page 21. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

AMERICAN FALLS — In the spring of 1952, Power County dry farmers who had tried contour strip cropping had a reassuring word for their neighbors: the method was easier to live with than it seemed at first sight.

One of the earliest in the county to make the change was Ross Saxton of the Crystal–Arbon area. Practically the whole of his 662-acre farm now lay in strips running along the slopes. Saxton said he enjoyed farming that way. Because his machinery now circled the hills rather than climbing them, "There is no shifting of gears to go up the hills." Nor had the change cost him working ground; by his account he could farm at least the acreage he had managed before, and perhaps more.

He extended an open invitation for the coming spring: anyone who visited his Arbon farm could look over the strips and judge for themselves what they did to save moisture and check erosion.

According to Tiede, who chaired the board of supervisors of the Power Soil Conservation District, strips covered 2,137 acres across the district, every one of them laid out within the last two years.

Still more were on the way. Rockland Valley would get its first contour strips the next spring, said Archibald, the Soil Conservation Service representative. Growers south of American Falls and in Pleasant Valley were also preparing, he said, to put their own fields into strips.

The paper ran a picture of Saxton's stripped fields alongside the item.

On this site: the Stories entries on the first combines of 1915 and on summer fallowing, the histories of Crystal and Buist, and Nelda Williams's memory of the winter of 1948–49.