grader (made in Owensboro, Kentucky) with tractor, and made horizontal terraces that would hold water above every row of trees. Mr. Lee reports that there was no run-off from this orchard for several years. His orchard was called to my attention by an expert apple grower who saw it from a distance and asked what had made the trees grow so much more rapidly than those in another orchard just across the road and which had been planted at about the same time.
5. I have seen pits dug as big as a barrel to catch trash and water in coffee plantations on Porto Rican hills. When the pit is full of leaves and silt, they plant a young tree in this beautifully prepared seed bed. I am told that this practice is common also in Central America.
6. These catchment pits have reached their most systematic development, and they are most extensively used under the name of silt pits in the tea plantations of Ceylon and rubber plantations of Malaya (Fig. 18), where they serve the double purpose of water-saver and soil-saver and have been dug by cheap coolie labor in thousands of acres of plantations. They are probably used in other parts of the Far East, but I have not seen them.
7. Water catchment pits have been effectively used by the Indian Forest Service.[1] On steep, eroded land the rainfall penetrated six inches without water pockets and four feet with water pockets.
8. This idea has had its most suggestive development in
- ↑ The effectiveness of these water pockets in the afforestation of denuded and gullied lands in India (along the Jumma, Chambal, and other rivers, especially in the Agra, Etawah, and Jalaun districts of the United Provinces) has been little short of miraculous. Centuries of overgrazing by cattle, goats, camels, and ponies had destroyed protective vegetation with the result that half a million acres of alluvium had become a net work of ravines. The normal rainfall of fourteen inches rushed away so rapidly that it wet the soil but six inches deep. After the digging of water pockets water penetrated to a depth of more than four feet, and reforestation was surprisingly successful. Babul trees reached a height of twenty feet in four years. (Information from E. A. Smythies, of the Indian Forest Service, Dec. 28, 1923.)
