Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/250

 land grabber and regard for the poor stockman's interests underlay the answer, but since then, increased confidence in the capacity of 40 acres of irrigated alfalfa land to produce hay sufficient to carry 3,000 head of the best grade of Merino sheep through an ordinary winter, there is no question but that the range portion of Oregon will soon have three times its present enumeration of families living in greater general comfort than was ever attainable when one herder took charge of 3,000 head during five months of summer ranging, not seeing his owner or camp supplier oftener than once in two weeks, and sometimes not once during the five months of May, June, July, August, and September. Every 40 acres, added to present alfalfa production, means an additional family home in the range portion of the state, and in some districts three or four, where, by fruit growing, 10 acres of irrigated ground will support a family, and an addition of 10 acres feed a family cow and a choice lot of 50 first-class Merino breeding sheep as means of sustaining range flocks up to the highest standard.

This last prediction may seem to some readers a chimera of the brain, but the writer has his own practice in mind in keeping a flock of first-class Merinos within his home lot of less than 20 acres, 17 acres of which was in orchards, and he had no such resource for securing the best kind of feeding hay, as alfalfa land under irrigation gives. It is, I believe, the history of successful breeding of the first quality of domestic stock in any given line, that the highest results are attained under one directing mind. In 1892 the writer, in the service of the Bureau of Animal Industry, visited the breeding farm of Mr. Frank Bullard of Wheatland, Cal. He was and had been for some years confessedly in the lead of breeders of Merinos of Vermont type in California. His feed barn was in a 10-acre lot, containing at the time of my visit over