Alpine agriculture in steep terrain

I recently ran into an old photograph taken in the 1950s by my schoolmaster, near my home village of Montriond, next to Morzine, in the northern French Alps. I still have that picture framed somewhere in my home. It shows a couple of elder peasants holding and walking a wooden container filled with dirt up the slope. 

This was done to compensate for soil erosion mostly due to gravity. In other mountainous and most advanced parts of the world like Eastern Asia or South America, where terracing was used, that is where parts of a sloped plane were cut into a series of successively receding flat steps, there would have been no need for that. 

This terracing practice however was totally unknown in Alpine agriculture, so local people would fight erosion-caused gravity by carrying back uphill the soil that inevitably rolled down the hill, in the spring, before planting. 

I still remember helping my brother with that very same chore in the early 60s. A chore it was, especially over steep fields where the wooden box inevitably ended up overloaded and far too hard to carry uphill! 

Thank God, that era is over and still, I had almost forgotten I once was part of it...