Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/337

 North Carolina where Mr. Lee, an engineer of Charlotte, North Carolina, has developed a fairly satisfactory engineering technique to do this thing in the mechanized American way that we like to call modern. He makes the pits on a large scale on the cut-over pine land with no other object than that of saving water for his company's (Southern Power Company) power plants and increasing the growth of the timber. He calls them "terrace with back ditch." This is essentially the same device as that of Mr. Lawrence Lee (No. 4 above), although the men are unknown to each other.

The water-holding terrace is merely a slight modification of the old drainage terrace so commonly used in the cotton fields of the South. (Figs. 23, 114, 115.)

The terrace type of land management has the great drawback of dividing a tract of land into small fields of irregular boundaries because the plows and cultivators cannot cross the terraced banks. However, tens of thousands of American cotton fields have been worked that way for decades. Any other way meant speedy ruin.

Note the excellence of this terraced field for one who would convert his farm to cropping trees. His customary farming method can go on undisturbed while young trees grow on the terrace banks. It was in such a place that Governor Hardman had planted some of the honey locusts in his almost unique honey locust orchard. (Page 65.)

The man whose mind happens to be molded in the level land farming idea is usually much shocked by the idea of modern agriculture in the little narrow strip of land of varying width between two terraces. Unquestionably it is awkward, and the cost per acre for working it is more than for working a wide flat area. Perhaps good management can make this pay. If we can only get out of the land-robbing philosophy and into the land-building philosophy, the little terrace may come