into its own. The sloping field with natural drainage almost always declines in fertility. The little hillside terrace does not lose its good soil, but gets better and better. With care it can be made to yield fifty or seventy-five bushels of corn instead of the fifteen or twenty of the slopes. You can turn many corners for that difference. The increased yield made possible on terraced land can make it compete in cost with the wide rolling unterraced lands.
If we get the concept of making the farming fit the land and then examine this little terraced strip we see the following facts. Its chief disadvantage appears when crops like corn, cotton, and tobacco are cultivated in rows. On these terraces there must be much winding back and forth of man and team. This disadvantage almost disappears if the land is sown to a broadcast crop such as alfalfa, oats, and other small grain, millet, cowpeas, etc., or soy bean or other legumes. Most of these can be harvested with the mowing machine and the hay rake, which require only a small amount of turning. Best of all, these crops can be harvested by the animals which bring us to the third new technique.
VI. A NEW TECHNIQUE—HOGGING DOWN CROPS
The chief invention in agricultural economics in the past quarter of a century has been the harvesting of crops by the pigs. It has now gone far beyond the experimental stage.[1] Each year in this country millions of acres of corn and hundreds of thousands of acres of clover, soy bean, cowpeas, peanuts, wheat, and other crops are not touched by human hand or by machine. The pig walks in and harvests the crop without cost and with much joy to himself.
I would lay especial emphasis on the suitability of the hog for harvesting crops on the little winding strip of tilled land
- ↑ Two counties in southwestern Wisconsin hogged down twenty-seven per cent. of the corn crop in 1926. (W. J. Spillman. U. S. Department of Agriculture.)
