Oh my goodness! Am I that old? It was explained above. It's called a lot of things and was really common when I was a kid. Farming on the contour; strip tilling, and other terms probably common to specific geographies. Back when I was a kid...sometime after the war between the states...it was quite common. Plowing the soil was common. When you flop the soil over with an x-bottom moldboard plow you create channels at the end of each plow blade. So, if you follow the land contour the channel is perpendicular to the slope of the land causing drainage to be captured in each of the small furrows created by plowing. People from what is now NRCS, then ASCS, laid out the contours, basically a topo map on the surface of the fields. Unfortunately this slowed the planting progress and eventually the whole idea got plowed under. It's still practiced some places especially in small fields with significant slope. Each field subsection - or subfield - was planted alternately. Corn -alfalfa or some other spring annual next to a perennial forage. Also, in the aerials displayed above there are CRP buffers on the field edges. Another conservation practice. Think of all this as generative agriculture. No need for the "re" part.
