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If terracing or summer fallowing or crop rotation is called for, they will carry them out. They stand ready to fit, and not to fight, the ways of Nature. We are helping, and shall continue to help the farmer to do those things, through local soil conservation committees and other cooperative local, state and federal agencies of government.
Before it reaches the Huatanay, the Lkalla Chaca joins the Cachimayo, famous as being so highly impregnated with salt as to have caused the rise of extensive salt works. In fact, the Pizarros named the place Las Salinas, or "the Salt Pits," on account of the salt pans with which, by a careful system of terracing, the natives had filled the Cachimayo Valley.
Experience has shown that there in great advantage in terracing the face of a hill before planting it, both as preventing the wash of the earth by checking the flow of water down its slope, and as presenting a surface favorable for irrigation, as well as for manuring and cultivating the tree.
Day after day, from sunrise to sunset, he fought with Nature in his small wilderness, and slowly won hewing, digging, terracing, cultivating, reclaiming plot after plot, and adding it to his conquests.
At the same time, there was an increase in cultivation of mountain slopes by terracing and by distributing water over the terraces in balanced systems. New irrigation machines, especially the so-called Persian wheel, were introduced in the Ming time.
The retention of the surface-waters upon or in the soil can hardly be accomplished except by the methods already mentioned, replanting of forests, and furrowing or terracing.
Pasture and meadow, indeed, may be irrigated even when the surface is both steep and irregular, as may be observed abundantly on the Swiss as well as on the Piedmontese slope of the Alps; but in dry climates, ploughland and gardens on hilly grounds require terracing, both for supporting the soil and for administering water by irrigation, and it should be remembered that terracing, of itself, even without special arrangements for controlling the distribution of water, prevents or at least checks the flow of rain-water, and gives it time to sink into the ground instead of running off over the surface.
I used to shut my eyes and imagine the transformation that would be wrought in these mountains by a colony of Swiss, who would turn the coves into gardens, the moderate slopes into orchards, the steeper ones into vineyards, by terracing, and who would export the finest of cheese made from the surplus milk of their goats.
In the ante-bellum South, likewise, it was the planters, and necessarily so, who introduced the new staples of sea-island cotton and sugar, the new devices of horizontal plowing and hillside terracing, the new practice of seed selection, and the new resource of commercial fertilizers.
It is not at first sight evident whether the terracing is due to periodic retirements of the ocean, or to the levelling effects of rivers that have cut channels through the deposit.
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