Contour Farming

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. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/