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Guymon, OK | My dad, granddad, and neighbors leveled a lot of ground in the '60s and '70s for furrow irrigation, and I say "leveling" because if there was a hill in the way, it was leveled. Someone from the county Soil Conservation Service office would come out and survey the land, then mark everything with flags that determined where, and how much, to cut and fill. They used paddle scrapers for the bulk of the work, and land planes for finishing.
You can always tell where a hill was leveled because of the lighter soil and lower yields. After the somewhat-fertile topsoil was removed the subsoil underneath was exposed, which is usually sandier, higher pH, and almost completely devoid of organic matter. At the time it didn't matter because being able to irrigate pretty much guaranteed higher yields over dryland, but now that we've transitioned to pivots it's pretty easy to see a significant yield drag in a lot of these places. There isn't a lot that a guy can do economically to fix it. | |
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Land Leveling question
