Grain, hay and seed, harvest and threshing, crop prices, farm machinery, and the pests that came for the crops.
Routine notices (meeting notices, reminders and classifieds) are left out of this list; find them under Notices.
In January 1931 Pocatello and Power County men set out for Boise to win federal money for Arbon Valley's wheat road down Bannock Creek, the start of a three-year push that the papers show ending with no money spent.
When Arbon Valley farmers complained that elk from the Pocatello game preserve were raiding their haystacks, two committees went to count the herd, found it shrinking rather than swelling, and advised against a hunt both times.
In February 1930 about twenty Arbon Valley wheat growers set out to form a local under Hoover's Federal Farm Board, and several of the same men later sat on the valley's New Deal farm committees.
Elk calves the state turned loose near Crystal grew into a herd of hundreds that wrecked fences and haystacks, until a Crystal rancher complained in 1927 and a cowboy was hired the next winter to keep them off the farms.
In the dry summer of 1926 Arbon Valley harvested one of the biggest wheat crops in its memory, early, and its farmers bought big new trucks to haul it to the railroad at Schiller.
In August 1924 a smut explosion on the Ray Hatfield place in Arbon Valley burned Clive Hatfield's threshing outfit, 75 sacks of wheat, a wagon, a derrick and a stack.
In October 1923 rival buyers bid up wheat at Schiller, the valley's railroad siding, and into the spring teams and trucks hauled the crop there, 26 miles from Pauline.
After a season of spotty fields, daily rains, weeds above the grain and town men who lost their nerve, Arbon Valley's warehouse took in 29,008 sacks of wheat, a figure the paper first printed as bushels.
In 1922 J. Parley Sorensen ran two headers on the Summit homestead he had proved up in 1914, land his descendants the Thompsons still farm and that Idaho named a Century Farm in 2024.
For nearly three decades Gwen and Lucille Hardman and their children went back and forth between a homestead on the Summit above Arbon and their hometown of Mendon, Utah, and the family kept the ranch going after Gwen died in 1937.
In 1921 Arbon Valley's own highway district lost its cash in a Pocatello bank failure, just as a big wheat crop had to be hauled to the railroad over bad roads.
Between 1920 and 1925 the Arbon valley's dry farmers raised good wheat and still lost ground to falling prices, high freight, scarce credit, failed banks and tax deeds, until two-dollar wheat came back.
George Arbon, oldest of the valley's first settlers and the man Arbon was named for, died at his son's Malad home in March 1921, after decades of lost crops elsewhere.
Snow fell on Arbon Valley before the 1920 threshing was done, and through a long winter the Arbon column of the American Falls Press kept track of the stranded grain, the families who left for town, the dances of those who stayed and a spring that kept turning back to snow.
In the wet spring of 1920 Arbon Valley farmers signed about 80 per cent of a promising crop over to the new Wheat Growers Association, then watched wheat prices slide through a long, hard winter.
In the spring of 1920 Arbon Valley's farmers chose a day to spread strychnine bait against the ground squirrels eating their wheat, part of a Power County campaign that ran for years and cost Ed Davis four of his best horses.
Before daylight on December 23, 1918, B. O. Kelley, hauling Pauline wheat for the Zaring Grain Company, drove his truck off the Bannock Creek bridge at Pauline and was killed, two days before Christmas.
Brothers Horace and Roy Humphrey kept smiling through good years and bad on the dry farms of Arbon and Crystal, and two of Horace's Arbon-born sons later made their way to Barrow, Alaska, and Promontory, Utah.
In 1918 Arbon Valley expected nearly half a million bushels of wheat with the railroad 25 to 35 miles away, and its call for motor trucks reached the national trade press.
In June 1918 the Pocatello Tribune called the Nonpartisan League's charge that Pauline wheat had rotted "rank fiction," a month after its own report that some of it had spoiled.
Sacked wheat bought in the fall of 1917 lay uncovered at a Pauline grain platform into the next summer, and while the nation saved wheat for the war, the Nonpartisan League carried its spoiling to Herbert Hoover.
In 1917 and 1918 Arbon Valley's wheat farmers fought Jim Hill mustard, a weed that rolled across the country as a tumbleweed, and the Press's roving farm writer gave the weed a chance to boast.
In the first year of America's war, Arbon Valley's dry-farm wheat came through hail, heat and Jim Hill mustard to a thin harvest that sold for as much as $1.95 a bushel.
From a 10-20 tractor plowing 350 acres in 1916 to a Fordson on a 1921 sale bill, the papers show the first tractors at work beside Arbon Valley's big horse teams.
In November 1917 a Pauline wheat buyer followed a stolen load by lantern, and Deputy Sheriff Hy Secrist waited for the thieves behind a telephone pole.
In the fall of 1917 the American Falls Press sent a farm writer who signed himself the Pilgrim over the roads of Crystal, Pauline and Arbon, mostly on foot, and he wrote down what he met along the way.
For eight years Arbon Valley farmers petitioned, met, signed notes at a dollar an acre and backed one railroad scheme after another, and in May 1916 the promoters carried the plan to American Falls, but no line was ever built.
In the fall of 1915, while smut ran through Arbon Valley wheat, Power County's new agent found none in Henry Shandrew's grain, and that same year a plant taken from a field near Arbon became a wheat immune to bunt.
A family from Dayton, Washington, came into Arbon by wagon after losing horses to poison on the road, in the same week that neighbors plowed fire guards to save 1,500 bushels of sacked grain near Knox Canyon.
In 1915 Arbon Valley sowed more wheat than ever, cut some of it with its first combines and threshed the rest with short-handed crews through a dry, fire-prone fall.