How To

What is Contour Farming?

Contour farming is a technology, a practice, or a system in sloping agricultural lands whereby crop rows are oriented perpendicular to or across the slope of the land.

Both in short-maturing annual crops, e.g., corn, and in perennial crops, e.g., coconut, the same rule applies.

Now there are special terms for relevant farming practices such as contour-hedgerow farming, contour-hedgerow-strip farming, and sloping agricultural land technology or SALT.

Planting in contour lines is the rule in sloping lands because if otherwise, the rows are in lines running from top to bottom, and the soil will be eroded downhill by wind and water.

But that is not all.

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Various methods of planting are practiced in crop farming.

These can be put under broad classifications such as direct seeding vs. transplanting, direct planting vs. indirect planting, and manual vs. mechanized planting.

This page is about the first alternative methods as applied mainly to crops that can be grown from seeds.

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Marcotting or air layering, an asexual or vegetative method of plant propagation, can be easily performed with less skill.

Air layering is just slightly different from other methods of layering such as tip layering, simple layering, compound or serpentine layering, etc.

In all these methods, the induction of root development is usually done by wounding the part of the plant to be rooted.

In this layering method, roots are induced to form on the part of the plant while it remains aerial (aboveground), hence the term air layering.

But in other layering methods, the same plant part is rooted on the ground usually by bending it downward.

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