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Contour plowing or contour farming is the farming practice of plowing and/or planting across a slope following its elevation contour lines. These contour line furrows create a water break, reducing the formation of rills and gullies during heavy precipitation and allowing more time for the water to settle into the soil. [ 1 ]
Traditional ploughing: a farmer works the land with horses and plough Water buffalo used for ploughing in Laos. A plough or plow (both pronounced / p l aʊ /) is a farm tool for loosening or turning the soil before sowing seed or planting. [1] Ploughs were traditionally drawn by oxen and horses but modern ploughs are drawn by tractors.
Repeated plowing/tilling degrades soil, killing its beneficial fungi and earthworms. Once damaged, soil may take multiple seasons to fully recover, even in optimal circumstances. [8] Critics argue that no-till and related methods are impractical and too expensive for many growers, partly because it requires new equipment.
Primary tillage is usually conducted after the last harvest, when the soil is wet enough to allow plowing but also allows good traction. Some soil types can be plowed dry. The objective of primary tillage is to attain a reasonable depth of soft soil, incorporate crop residues, kill weeds, and to aerate the soil.
Random contour plowing also becomes off contour but usually with the opposite effect on runoff, namely causing it to quickly run off ridges and concentrate in valleys. The limitations of the traditional system of soil conservation, with its "safe disposal" approach to farm water, was an important motivation to develop Keyline design.
The practice of no-till farming is a combination of different ideas developed over time, many techniques and principles used in no-till farming are a continuation of traditional market gardening found in various regions like France. [10] A formalized opposition to plowing started in the 1940s with Edward H. Faulkner, author of Plowman's Folly. [11]
The ard, ard plough, [1] or scratch plough [2] is a simple light plough without a mouldboard.It is symmetrical on either side of its line of draft and is fitted with a symmetrical share that traces a shallow furrow but does not invert the soil.
A four-ox-team plough, circa 1330. The ploughman is using a mouldboard plough to cut through the heavy soils. A team could plough about one acre (0.4 ha) per day. The typical planting scheme in a three-field system was that barley, oats, or legumes would be planted in one field in spring, wheat or rye in the second field in the fall and the third field would be left fallow.