Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/358

 impounding of run-off gully water in grain and alfalfa fields to the great improvement of the crop.

This device, however, has much wider possibilities with trees than with grain and hay for the reason that grain and hay require wide areas, while a tree can stand at the bottom of a gully in a ravine.

Here is an interesting possibility for the million or more square miles of arid lands between Kansas and California, and between northern Alberta and southern Mexico. At present millions of arroyos (gullies) waste their rushing waters at the time of occasional rains. These gullies might become rows of useful trees fed and watered by the gully itself.

Perhaps the water of gullies could be led into long horizontal trenches or field reservoirs reaching long distances across the face of the slope and lined with the fruit-yielding trees which would be watered every time the gully flowed. This practice would be closely akin to the one common in parts of Shansi, a Chinese province southwest of Peking with scanty rain. There in the agricultural villages one of the common sounds of summer nights is the booming of the temple gong as the priests walk through the streets awaking the people to the fact that there has been a shower on the hills and the gullies are running. The population scurries out armed with shovels and diverts water from gully to field.

I have seen these fields months in advance all prepared, the field banked around, and gullies with dams so that when the first rain came it would irrigate field number one. Shovel out the dam, and the water would flow down and irrigate field number two; and so on.

May not the use of cement, accurate leveling devices, roadscraping machines, tractors, and dynamite in America put rain-catching devices on a basis that is not only mechanized but almost automatic, so that the gully water might fill our field reservoirs while we slept?

Plant breeders might produce hardy and productive strains