MOUNTAIN AGRICULTURE

Hokitika Guardian, 5 January 1926, Page 4

MOUNTAIN AGRICULTURE

■ . —— ' AN AMERICAN REVOLUTION. American mechanical genius is beginning to revolutionise mountain agriculture (writes Professor Walter B. Pitkin, Columbia University, for .“Science Service”). ‘ln the last tv.only jeais the art of rice growing has been taken out of the hands of the Asiatics and adapted to machine methods so successfully that our high-priced workers now prouce the crop as cheaply as the 'eight-cent-a-day Chinese coolie. But this is as nothing compared with tho changes being wrought in tho handling of hillsides down south. For years the Appalachian slopes have been washing away, with terrific losscss to the farmer, because men of western European stock applied the tricks of flat land farming to tho steeps. They bad never heard of the

terraces and water boles which the Corsican mountaineer, the Javan farmer and the persistent Japanese make to hold the rains and the rich earth on slopes as sharp as a house roof. When news of these methods first came" to the American, lie was unwilling to use them, because of the vast amount of heavy labour required to build such dirt architecture. But, after a while, he began wondering whether machines couldn’t turn the trick. And, surely enough, machines would. A retired engineer, Lawrence I.ee. of Lees Lon, Virginia, seems to have been tho first- to hit on a way of using tractors, anil a specially designed scraper for such work. Even in the heaviest thunderstorms of .summer, hardly a drop of water runs off the sixty acres which Mr Lee now has terraced and planted an orchard. Some parts of this tract have a pitch of about 40 degrees, which is quite as great as most of the remarkable mountainside terraces in the Philippines and Java, where for centuries the hanking of soil and car* of crops have all been done by the most laborious of hand-work.

In the last few years progressive farmers in North and South Carolina have adopted this new technique, especially in tho badly eroded stretches along the Catawba River, thousands of acres have been delivered from the ravages of the rains. Applied to the millions of acres in Appalachia which are being washed away, this method will conserve many hundred million dollars’ worth of topi soil, and it will convert what is now an unprofitable wilderness into a rich Empire. Land worth nothing to-day, can, in a few seasons, he transformed into forage crop acreage worth at least fifteen years of tree planting along the terrace rides, this same land, as had already been demonstrated in Virgin*yields a return that makes it worth from seventy-live to two hundred dollars pier acre.

Professor ,T. Russell Smith, the e-o----noniic geographer at Columbia University, lias made a special study of of the. Old "World terrace methods and of these new American ways. He lia.s found rough mountainsides in Corsica yielding corn. He states that a now dividend-paying country about the size of France will be added to the United States as soon as the Appalachian region adopts generally the tractorbuilt terrace of tho Lee type ami develops fast-growing hardwood trees to plant on the land. That oaks, walnuts, and hickories can grow much faster than the "o uimni run of them now do is quite as ecrlaiu as the improvements widen have been wrought in corn, wheat, apple* and many other crops. Were it possible to increase, by Selective breeding. the rate of good growth by only twenty or twenty-five per cent., this would eventually add many millions of dollars to our national wealth.