Aerial photos of the contour plowing done on Lin Shuey’s land during that same era (I graduated in 1972) make his words seem like a compliment.
Taken by the Clark Soil and Water Conservation District, the pictures show land that looks like a cross between some ancient Mayan earth works and mysterious crop circles.
The patterns on the land just behind just off Ohio 4 match the name of the cemetery they border: Pleasant Hill.
But their purpose was practical, doing what the soil and water conservation district continues to do in its 70th year: help farmers maximize their production in ways that keep the land from washing away and that keep cleaner the creeks it would wash into.
“The ground was pretty rolling, and you’d lose a lot of soil,” said Shuey, who was first a customer and later a 20-year member of the district’s board. (He shares a longevity record on the board with Paul Snyder.)
Shuey still has the contour plans, coded like archaeologists charts of ancient ruins. Chris Simpson, current administrator of the district, told me the letters identify the type of soil on the land and the numbers tell the slope of the ground.
With that information, designers went to work.
In contour plowing, crop rows ideally cut horizontally across a hill, acting like gutters attached to the eaves of a house. They can slow stop the water to a point where the soil would have a chance to absorb it.
When the flow of water overwhelmed the crop rows, the overflow would run onto a strip of land covered by grass or hay . This had even greater power to slow the water and give the land time to drink it in.
Downhill from all the contour strips were grass waterways, planted to handle the runoff from above and keep it from from cutting gullies into the dirt. This not only stops soil from washing away, but the manure and fertilizer attached to it.
Shuey farms have been influenced by running water for decades.
Two-hundred-fifty acres Lin’s relatives had trouble dragging an old John Deere plow throw now sit at the bottom of the C.J. Brown Reservoir, sacrificed to flood control.
The Shueys weren’t happy to lose the land, but the grandfather clock in Lin Shuey’s front hall presents a strong argument about the need: “Dad says it went down the stream in the 1913 flood.”
The contour strips are long gone now, replaced by no-till practices that let Sam Shuey farm the land his dad farmed as one large field.
And that’s the very kind of information I could have used in discussions with my own father back in the early 1970s.
There he was, stuck in his old world talking about contour plowing when I’d moved my hairstyle on to the next big movement in soil and water conservation: no-till.
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