Large Crops Vindicate Colorado Dry Farmers.
The farmers from the Central States, who have visited Logan County, Colo., this year, or passed across its broad acres in automobiles or on the trains, have opened their eyes with wonder at the beautiful fields of grain of every description, sugar beets, alfalfa and wild hay, vegetables, and other products of the soil. They have seen excellent crops growing, not only in the valleys, but on the broad plains of this country that a few years ago were the haunts of the Indians, buffaloes, and the coyotes.
No doubt many of them a few years ago were solicited by land men to invest in some of these fertile acres at from $1.25 to $3 an acre, but thinking that the real-estate men[{63}] were working some wildcat scheme on them, they turned the proposition down. But those who have had the opportunity to view the fields in Logan County this year have no doubt wished a hundred times over that they had taken advantage of the investments offered them, for they could have reaped a harvest in one season that would pay for the land twenty times at the price offered them.
The Sterling district alone this year planted 28,000 acres of sugar beets that will produce as many tons to the acre as any beet crop that has ever been harvested in the State. The farmers of Logan County are just completing the harvesting of 41,000 acres of wheat and hundreds of acres of rye, millet, barley, and flax, thousands of acres of alfalfa and wild hay, to say nothing of the corn, potatoes, melons, pumpkins, and every other kind of farm products that the Eastern farmer values so highly.
It is estimated by reliable authorities, basing their estimations on the yield of fields already threshed, that the wheat production in Logan County this year will average twenty bushels to the acre. This will give Logan County farmers more than 800,000 bushels of wheat. The beet crop this year will produce 400,000 tons of beets which will bring better than $5 a ton.
The alfalfa crop is larger this year than ever before, two cuttings having already been harvested, and the third cutting is almost ready.
Hundreds of Eastern people, who visited the Logan County Fair, which has just closed, were astonished at the exhibition in the Agriculture Building. It is safe to say that every one of those who viewed the grand display will be a booster for Logan County. They will tell that they saw cabbage raised in Logan County that measured 48 inches in circumference and corn that is equal to any they ever saw raised in the Missouri Valley or any of the corn States. They will also tell that they saw potatoes that would make Eugene Grubb, the expert in the Grand Valley, go into ecstasies. They also will tell that they saw pumpkins, watermelons, and other garden and field vegetables that would be a credit to a tropical country.
While Logan County does not make claims of being a fruit country, the visitors will describe to their friends a splendid showing of apples, crabapples, plums, and berries. And even the sunflowers that they saw are over 14 feet high.