FARMING THE SKY 🌄
This was the picture on my laptop this morning — terraces poured down a mountainside in Peru's Sacred Valley, above the town of Pisac. The caption said people have carved farmland out of that landscape for thousands of years. It's true. They started about 4,000 years ago.
They're called andenes — hand-built farm steps. Dig deep, raise a stone wall, fill it in layers, then haul topsoil UP the mountain basket by basket. The stone drinks the sun all day and gives the heat back at night, which is how they grew corn at 11,500 feet. At the Inca peak there were about 2.5 million acres of them, feeding some 10 million people — and families still plant these same steps today.
The full story — a crop laboratory built into a hole in the earth, 3,000 kinds of potato, corn with kernels the size of a quarter — is on our website. Comment UNCUT and we'll get you the link. 👇
📸 Pisac: Galleta322 · Moray: Jay Galvin, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)