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crowd represents a pretty good territory in Illinois. I came from Burling- 

 ton over here this morning and I noticed I came over pretty level country. 

 It occurred to me that maybe my talk won't fit in Warren County, but I 

 take it that many of you are from other counties, and perhaps many of you 

 do have more or less rough land, and if you have a simple little operation 

 will save what you have. 



If you have land that slopes, that is inclined to wash, there is a 

 simple little operation that you can perform that won't cost much, that will 

 beat your old method of going out after such rains as we have had lately 

 and filling the gullies full of straw and hedge brush. Why didn't we think 

 of that years ago? It is nothing in the world but terracing land that is 

 inclined to wash. I did quite a bit of terracing in Missouri, in the county 

 where I served four years as Farm Adviser, and this last fall did some of 

 the first terracing that was done in Adams County. We have terraced prob- 

 ably half a dozen farms in Adams County, in different parts of the county. 



Now what is terracing and where can we apply it? It can be used on 

 any sloping land that we intend to farm, or have in grass, as far as that 

 goes, but especially land rotated from crops to grass that is inclined 

 to wash. I think I can illustrate it by putting a diagram on the board of 

 a forty acre field, we will say, that is rather rough. There is a kind of 

 ravine that comes through it like this (illustrating on board). That is a 

 picture that I want you to get. There is a slope here of ten feet in a hun- 

 dred, or fifteen feet in a hundred. That is the way this land slopes. When- 



Constructing a terrace with a small road grader. 



(Courtesy Missouri Experiment Station) 



ever we have a heavy rain it is inclined to wash, especially like the rain we 

 had here night before last. I don't know whether you had it here, but we 

 had it in Quincy night before last. At a meeting last night some men were 

 talking to me and said, "Gracious, that rain did damage plowed fields." 

 Here are these gullies. We can imagine they are gullies. As soon as it is 

 dry enough for the farmer to get out there and fix it he will put some straw 

 in here and here and here (indicating). I had a man tell me the other day, 

 "By golly, I ran out of hedge brush. I don't know what to do now, unless 

 I try your scheme." It is not my scheme. It is as old as the hills in the 

 south where they grow cotton, with nothing in the ground to hold it from 

 washing, 



