Planting by Air

Planting

PHOTOGRAPHS AND STORY Atop a purple mesa in the land of the Hopi a mounted Indian shaded his eyes and looked into the northern Arizona sky. There in the hot blue a tiny airplane appeared, grew larger. As the roar of its motors increased, he could see that it was dropping something-trailing behind it was a cloud of brownish specks. It swished low past him, raining its hard little bombs in an even swath, and raced onward.He dismounted, walked over and picked up one of the brown pellets. What was it, this hard little pea? Why was it dropped on his homeland his reservation? What could it mean?

Simply put, the meaning was this: the United States Government, through the Department of the Interior, was investing an initial $175,000 in an Arizona experiment. If successful, part of the gamble would be taken out of farming. If successful, it would furnish means of replanting denuded lands in the most efficient manner possible. That small pellet, perhaps, would stop the snowball of erosion that threatens our land.

The first seed pellet planting by air was done on Arizona's Papago Indian Reservation at Sells in May of last year. It was a singularly appropriate site for this newest quirk in farming for this land was one of America's

by Air

BY WESTERN WAYS First and most discouraging-farmlands. Papagos have been tilling the brown hard soil of the Arizona desert for centuries, wresting their living from its reluctant yield of beans and pasture. These years of planting and grazing had left little resistance in the land. Several dry years plus an increase in the number of Papago cattle had ruined the Papago land.

When the government decided to finance Doctor Lytle S. Adams in testing his invention of pellet planting by air, they decided that if he could make the Papago land bloom, he could turn any of the desert country of the United States into a garden.

In May the airplane rained its first pellet bombs down onto the land of the Papago. July saw Doctor Adams re-seeding the San Carlos Indian Reservation near Globe. Early fall, and Polacca in Northern Arizona was receiving its shower of drought-resistant Lehmanns Lovegrass encased in the brown pills.

In all, some 30,000 acres have been planted in this vast experiment. Another 20,000 are to be bombarded. Indications even now show that planting pellets by air is successful. Whether the wholesale planting of thousands of barren acres will be practical from an economic viewpoint is being tested on the wastelands of Arizona.

If Arizona's land blossoms, much credit will go to stocky, bronzed, white-thatched Doctor Lytle S. Adams. It will not be his first successful invention, for when "Doc" Adams mulls over a problem he is likely to come up with a solution so simple it has been overlooked by experts.

When the resourceful retired dentist learned that approximately 130 million acres of public land were in an appalling condition, he determined that something should be done. How would it be possible, Doctor Adams wondered, to replant this land, accurately and economically? Nosing around into the problems of the farmer, the Doctor learned something everyone knew but couldn't

Of the millions of tons of seeds planted in this country each year, only a small percentage mature and yield a crop. That, he felt, was a difficulty that should-and could-be solved.

Another problem was the lightness of seeds. To plant rapidly, they should be sowed from the air, but they were not heavy enough to ensure their dropping in the right place.

A seed pellet was the obvious answer to both problems. A tiny earthen bomb which may revolutionize farming was Doctor Adams' solution.

He had noticed that the most reliable planting was that done by Nature. An animal-a rabbit for examplewould nibble at a cactus fruit. Later, new cacti popped up where ever there were rabbit droppings.

Obviously, Doctor Adams reasoned, this was because the seeds were stripped of their husks and then replanted, amply surrounded by a fertilizing agent. He could do the same thing artificially: husk the seeds and mix them with a fertilizer. But hundreds of seeds were carried off each year by ants or eaten by rodents. Unfettered by knowledge of what could not be done, Doctor Adams mixed insectrodent repellent with the seeds.

The first step in making the pellets is performed by a hammer mill which pulverizes to a fine silt the earth for the pellet's coating.

Ingeniously the pellet machine blows the dirt from a hopper in a trough. There jet nozzles squirt enough moisture into the dirt to hold it together while another jet sprays in the insect-rodent repellent. The husked seed, dusted with fungicide drops through a small slot, alloting enough seed to provide each pellet with from three to seven seeds.

After powdered fertilizer is sifted in, the mixture is poured into a funnel, which feeds it slowly to revolving disks which pack the mixture into tiny, uniform balls, pellets or pills.

Doctor Adams worked with the pellet machine, modifying, improving, changing until the present model turns out 6,000 pounds of pellets each eight hours. The cost of manufacture of the pellets exclusive, of course, of the cost of seeds is less than $2.00 an acre.(The seeds, incidentally, which are used in this experiment were imported from Africa by the Department of the Interior. They are Lehmanns Lovegrass, which is drought-resistant and provides good forage for cattle. The pellet-process may be applied to other types of seeds to advantage, since they space planting.) The final job of inventing required of Doctor Adams was a seeder to be attached to the airplane which would feed the pellets to the ground. The centrifugal device now used whirls at a uniform speed, flinging the pellets out in a pattern, about one per square foot. Cutting a swath 1,000 feet wide, one acre per second is average for the plane-planting.

On the hard ground the pellets lie, self-contained, unappealing to gophers, birds and insects. Then one day the Arizona sky will become cloudy and rain drops will fall. One will touch the tiny pellet, and within two days a sturdy stalk of Lehmanns Lovegrass will sprout.

It will be a quiet process, miles from civilization, in the fastness of the Hopi Reservation. No trumpets will herald the sprouting of these blades of grass. Yet, as the clay splits open and the tender green leaves appear, it may well be a signal of revolution in farming.

The subdued snap may be the doom of eroded land.