The idea has been modernized and brought to the machine stage which characterizes our present-day agriculture, by Mr. Lawrence Lee, a civil engineer-farmer of Leesburg, Va. Mr. Lee runs a level line across the face of the clay hills, and then with a Martin ditcher scoops out a terrace on this horizontal line. It makes the terrace so that the water will hold and will not run away. Mr. Lee is sure that nine-tenths of the heavy thunder shower runs off of the hills, in normal conditions of non-plowing, and that if he plows, most of the water and much of the soil go off together. He is also sure that the water pockets hold both water and soil.
Rows of apple trees planted below these waterholding terraces thrive without cultivation as well as do other trees across the row with cultivation, but with this difference, ordinary cultivation impoverishes the soil and this enriches it by keeping all mineral and organic matter in the field.
The combination of principles worked out by many primitive peoples and also by Messrs. Thorpe, Meyer and Lee makes it possible for the farmer to arrange his rough land in tree crops so that every rain will water his crops, even though the land may be rough and in sod. If he cannot run horizontal terraces he can dig holes near the trees and lead the water to these holes by two furrows with the turning plow. This is really an automatic kind of irrigation. By this means a farmer can use his odd time whenever he can work the ground, and thus do the cultivation for a whole year or two and at the same time preserve the soil and establish a permanent agriculture.
This gives the hill land the same chance as the level lands to grow fat sods. It offers a very interesting combination of blue grass pasture along with crops of black walnuts, Persian (English) walnuts, pecans, grafted hickories, mulberries (for pigs and chickens), persimmons (for pigs and sheep), oaks (which make more carbohydrate food than corn in many situations), honey locust (which has a bean as rich as bran and good for the same purpose) and many other crop trees that will be available if good brains keep developing the idea.
In this connection it may be pointed out that France exports millions of dollars worth of Persian walnuts and most of them are grown on isolated trees scattered about the fields and along roadsides.
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THE PRESIDENT: We will now adjourn to Sormani's for luncheon and then we will immediately start for Mr. Bixby's place on Long Island.
(Adjournment).
NOTES AT MR. BIXBY'S NUT ORCHARDS AND NURSERIES BALDWIN, NASSAU CO., N. Y.
September 4, 1924