Practices

Contour Farming

Also Known As Contour Plowing

Citation Formats

General Reference

Agriculture and Farming Atlas. "Contour Farming." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/practices/contour-farming.

APA Style

Agriculture and Farming Atlas. (n.d.). Contour Farming. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/practices/contour-farming

BibTeX

@misc{agricultureandfarmingatlas-contour-farming,
  author = {Agriculture and Farming Atlas},
  title = {Contour Farming},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/practices/contour-farming},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Plowing and planting along a slope's own elevation contour instead of straight up and down it, so each furrow becomes a small water break that slows runoff and lets it soak in rather than carve a gully. The 1934 Yearbook of Agriculture found roughly 260 million acres of American farmland with topsoil already badly damaged or destroyed; contour farming, spread nationally through the new Soil Conservation Service, was one of the direct responses, and by 1938 the combined conservation measures had cut soil loss by 65 percent even though the drought had not broken. Done well it can also raise row-crop yields by as much as half.

Facts

Practice Class

Land shaping and erosion control 1

Origin

Promoted nationally across the United States from the 1930s by the newly created Soil Conservation Service, formed in 1935 in direct response to the Dust Bowl. 1

Cross-Tradition Connections