r seen such
fine olive trees, not in California, or the plains of Spain, Portugal,
France, Italy, or in Algeria or Tunis, and I have seen a good many olive
trees in those countries. The olive tree is usually open, light and
feathery. These in the Matmatas gulches are thick and black and rank.

For automatic cultivation and fertilization the plan of these primitive
agriculturists is hard to beat. You put up your stone dam, and every
time the gulley runs with water your crop is irrigated and fertilized.
Can you beat it?

Three Americans of my acquaintance have independently experimented and
discovered along similar lines.

The late Freeman Thorpe of Hubert, Minnesota, did it with much
enthusiasm. So did the late Dr. Meyer, a friend of J. F. Jones, near
Lancaster. He discovered it accidentally. He put a brush dam across a
gully. Water stood behind it for days after every rain. The apple tree
near it grew much more than the others. That started the Doctor. He
began to dig small field reservoirs and collect water near trees and he
found that it paid even with the very expensive process of hoe and
shovel.

The idea has been modernized and brought to the machine stage which
characterizes our present-day agriculture, by Mr. Lawrence Lee, a civil
engineer-farmer of Leesburg, Va. Mr. Lee runs a level line across the
face of the clay hills, and then with a Martin ditcher scoops out a
terrace on this horizontal line. It makes the terrace so that the water
will hold and will not run away. Mr. Lee is sure that nine-tenths of the
heavy thunder shower runs off of the hills, in normal conditions of
non-plowing, and that if he plows, most of the water and much of the
soil go off together. He is also sure that the water pockets hold both
water and soil.

Rows of apple trees planted below these waterholding terraces thrive
without cultivation as well as do other trees across the row with
cultivation, but with this difference, ordinary cultivation impoverishes
the soil and this enriches it by keeping all mineral and organic matter
in the field.

The combination of principles worked out by many primitive peoples and
also by Messrs. Thorpe, Meyer and Lee makes it possible for the farmer
to arrange his rough land in tree crops so that every rain will water
his crops, even though the land may be rough and in sod. If he cannot
run horizontal terraces he can dig holes near the trees and lead the
water to these holes by two furrows with th