blackfoot-valley

productive years, especially young people just starting out - even though many of these would prefer to stay in Montana were better opportunities available. The result is a preponderance of the very young and old. It is not yet clear what might change or break this cycle. The activities that boomed earlier, except for the fur trade, do remain significant in today’s Montana economy: mining, stockraising, farming, forestry. Of all these, agriculture is in first place. Ranching continues to be a vital part of the total economy, de- spite having been surpassed by agriculture early in the twentieth century. Despite rivalries aplenty - ranchers and farmers have historically been rivals and at odds on many issues, especially use of the land - and notwith- standing agriculture’s greater overall economic presence, the acreage used for grazing in the state is many times greater than that of farmed land. For in this semiarid region, the fact is that much of the land is simply not suited for sustained farming. Precipitation is not only insufficient and undepend- able, but large areas are neither physically nor economically practical to ir- rigate. If too much marginal or unsuitable land is put into farming during good years, disaster ensues in dry years and much precious topsoil blows away in dust storms, as happened in eastern Montana and elsewhere in the Great Plains during the early 1920s and mid-1930s when huge acreages had to be abandoned. In the greater part of Montana, just as in other semiarid 93