From up high, the hills around here look almost hand-painted. Long bands of corn and hay curve along each slope, one after another, following the shape of the land. It's one of our favorite views around here, and we caught this one from the drone over a neighboring farm.
What you're seeing is called contour strip cropping. Instead of planting a whole hillside in one crop running up and down the slope, the farmer plants strips that run across it, alternating a row crop like corn with bands of hay or grass.
It's a simple idea that does a lot of good. When a hard rain comes, water running downhill hits a thick band of hay or grass and slows down. The soil it was carrying settles there instead of washing to the bottom of the hill or into the creek. On hilly western Pennsylvania ground, that makes a real difference, and farmers have been using it for generations.
Every farm finds its own way to care for the ground it's been given. On ours, that starts with pasture. Our hillsides stay covered in grass and clover, and those roots hold the soil in place through every storm. We move our cattle to fresh pasture often and give each paddock plenty of time to rest and regrow, and the grass comes back thicker each time.
We still have work to do, though. Right now, when a heavy rain comes, a lot of water floods right off our fields. Over time we've been changing that with berms, a technique we learned from Mark Shepard. We cut trenches in rows across the field on a slight grade, about 1% downhill, and pile the soil into berms alongside them. Instead of rushing straight down the slope, the water follows those rows slowly and is carried to catchment ponds.
Along those rows we've planted chestnut trees. As the trees grow, their roots will add to the effect, holding soil and helping water soak deeper into the ground. And as we renew the trenches over the years, they'll keep catching water that would otherwise run off.
A lot of our thinking comes from P.A. Yeomans and his book Water for Every Farm. His idea is to keep the rain that falls on a farm on that farm as long as possible, so that over time you build up the water table instead of watching it drain away.
Strip cropping on one hill, pasture and berms on the next. The tools look different, but the goal is the same, which is to keep water and soil on the land and leave it better than we found it. We're grateful to farm among neighbors who care about that too.
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