For those of you who have tillable acreages, there might be something of interest here:

THE DEVELOPMENT AND PRACTICE OF KEYLINE

The Graham Plow -- a gang chisel plow adjustable for depth -- is critical in this method. I haven't been able to find any current manufacturer -- but there are enough photos in this site so that someone with mech and welding skills could build one.

This text was copyrighted in 1958, which says to me the author ws influenced by Louis Bromfield's innovative use of the Graham plow in Ohio from the early 1940's onward/

Bromfield, a very successful writer of fiction, left France in 1940 and returned to northern Ohio, where he had lived as a child. He proceeded to buy three wornout farms near Mansfield in Richland Co, Ohio. These farms had been abandoned for many years, since careless farming practice had allowed the topsoil to be eroded away and the remaining subsoil converted to gullied hardpan which could neither accept or store rainfall. The only vegetation was scattered poverty grass. Flowing springs had dried up in the last century.

Using methods new at the time, Bromfield in very few years restored these farmlands to productivity, with deep, fertile soil, flowing springs, and virtually no erosion. His main tools for this were the Graham chisel plow (to break the hard layer of clay which kept rainfall on the surface to run off into the streams); leguminous (nitrogen-fixing) cover crops such as biennial sweet clover, whose deep roots in decay form channels for rainfall to go deep under the surface; and the rotary tiller to chop and mix cover crops into the soil.

Bromfield has described his methods in detail in his Malabar Farm (Harper, 1948), Out of the Earth (Harper 1950), and From My Experience (Cassell 1956).

-- Anonymous, March 02, 2001

Answers

Guess I'll have to find the books. All the links came back with the "404" message.

Dennis

-- Anonymous, March 03, 2001

There was only one link in my post, http://www.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/010126yeomansII/0101 26toc.html. When I open it, it works.

The book references just show title, publisher, and year of publication. For finding used and out-of-print books, ABE Books is a great resource.

-- Anonymous, March 03, 2001

Checking further--

Something's bent out of shape on that website. The link I gave above still works, but none of the links on that page works.

The website directory for the entire book is at http://w ww.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/010125yeomans/. You can access these pages by way of the links shown there.

Seems they've changed the individual URL's but failed to change them on the front page where they're indexed.

-- Anonymous, March 03, 2001