When I purchased my property in the early 90s it was sloped and had a
thicket of overgrowth that reached the house. Removing the bamboo, vines,
and hack berries was necessary but doing so would contribute to erosion on
such a steep slope. The soil in Barton Hills is six inches deep if you are
lucky. So Terracing made sense from a erosion management point of view.
Terracing turns otherwise unusable hillsides into usable land suitable for
growing. It also handles heavy rains much better. The image below shows a
hill in the region of Cinque Terre Italy where otherwise unusable land was
transformed into fertile vineyards. So the first step for me in rainwater
harvesting was to terrace my property.