ENDANGERED SPECIES

Bainbridge relates how he and other land restorationists have successfully recovered large areas with degraded soil in arid environments using pitting implements that have been outfitted with disks, tines, or scrapers. In the author’s field experiments, pitting has resulted in moisture penetrations of 24 inches on sandy loam and 11 inches on clay, compared to five inches of penetration on untreated sandy loam and two inches on untreated clay. The author describes several mechanical pitters, including the light-weight, two-disk "Camel," from the Australian Revegetation Corporation of Osborne Park, Western Australia, that is designed to be pulled by a twoor four-wheel-drive truck.