January i, 1885.] 



THE TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST. 



5°5 



TEA CULTIVATION IN CEYLON. 



" THE GOOD TIME COMING " ; A WORD 



OF WARNING. 

 For many weeks back we have been intending to 

 sound a further note of warniug in reference to the 

 reporls of tea-planting which reach us from nearly 

 every coffee district in the country. The gradual 

 change which we have watched with pleasure during 

 the past few years has, this season, developed into 

 au activity which in some respects may be termed at 

 once abnormal aud unhealthy. We are threatened 

 with a transformation scene in which an expanse of 

 coffee covering hundreds of equare miles of country 

 is to be suddenly exhibited to the admiring gaze of 

 all and sundry, uniformly covered with tea. • The 

 serrated bright green leaves are to tako the place of tho 

 dark-green laurel-like vegetation, aud proprietors whe 

 have been despairing over coffee plantations hopelessly 

 smitten with tho dire fungus are, in the shortest 

 possible interval, to be enabled to rejoice in an 

 equal expanse of the future king of Ceylon staples, 

 tea. Considering the local scarcity of capital, it is 

 astonishing to watch the large areas which are 

 being planted over with this new product, and the 

 only parallel we can find to the urgent way in 

 which the work of planting is being carried on in 

 some districts, is in the great rush of 1870-6 

 into the Dimbula and Maskeliya districts when 

 men used to boast of planting their 500, 700 and 

 even 1,000 acres with coffee in one season. 

 Not once or twice, but very often in the Observer 

 of that day did we state openly that such men in 

 place of boasting, ought to be ashamed of themselves ; 

 for that it was utterly impossible that any individual 

 planter could do justice even as supervisor or visitor 

 to the planting oi so large an area. Far preferable 

 wns the system in the old Kandy districts when if an 

 estate manager planted 50 or at most 100 acres in a 

 single seas in, reading and draining his clearing and 

 doing his task will, he was considered to have got 

 through a heavy bit of work. We need scarcely say that 

 no small proportion of the poor results given by coffee 

 in the high districts — making all allowance for leaf 

 disease — may be traced to hasty work, the use of 

 poor plants which were transferred from nursery to 

 field anyhow and Anally to the neglect ensuing on a mad 

 speculative spirit which left purchasers burdened 

 with debt out of all proportion to the crops in esse 

 or in posse. That we are not exaggerating is proved by 

 the fact that there are individual estates in the 

 young districts, some of them in the poorest corners 

 which, notwithstanding all the txperience of disease 

 and short crops of the past seven years, have through 

 strict economy and avoidance of debt, paid their way 

 and left margins to the proprietors which have en- 

 abled cinchona and finally tea to be judiciously plauted 

 in superces-ion of portions of the coffee. 



Now-a-days the emulation which ten years ago gave 

 no rest lo the land until every strip of forest 

 in so many upland districts was cleared away and re- 

 placed by the coffee shrub, is prompting a similar 

 widespread supeice*sion of the old staple by the on3 

 product, tea. It is in deprecation of any such sweep- 

 ing process of superci ssion that we wculd uow offer 

 words of warniug to proprietors. The other day we 

 heard of a geutleman in one old district who was 

 the possessor of !-00 acres of tea and we could not 

 help remarking that probably in the long-run ffe would 

 be as well off with half that area, carefully selected 

 aud as carefully planted. We went of course a good 

 64 



deal on the fact that acre for acre, tea entails a good 

 deal more responsibility than coffee, and that both 

 in respect of cost of cultivation, expense of pnpara 

 tion, labour supply and supervision, the proprietor 

 of- 800 acres of tea must be considered to be as heavily 

 weighted as probably the owner of a coffee plantation 

 with from 1,200 to 1,400 acres in cultivation. Of 

 course when all the conditions referred to have been 

 provided for aud when the proprietor is clear that his 

 ceffee land is never to do him any good, we have 

 nothing more to say about its supercession save that 

 the motto should be Festiwi lente. We have a strong 

 leaning to the policy attributed to one menber of 

 the Stalkart family— long and honorably connected 

 with the Indian tea enterprise — namely the limiting 

 each of his gardens to from 50 to 100 acres and 

 when a manager asked leave to trench on reserves 

 and add to the importance of his ch rge the 

 answer would be : ' No ; cultivate what you have 

 and raise the yield from 6 to 8 maunds aud your 

 average price per lb, by 2d, and your salary will then 

 be increased just as much as if you had 150 to 300 

 acres in your charge in place of 100.' We commend 

 this policy to the serious attention of proprietors in 

 Ceylon. Not once or twice in the past history of 

 planting have we seen the proprietor of a most re- 

 munerative hundred acres of coffee, rained by the 

 hasty and unwise enlargement of his estate— cuttiig 

 down every stick of reserve irrespective of shelter, lay 

 of laud and quality of soil— to an area of two hundred 

 acres. Let the tea-garden proprietor with a moderate 

 amount of capital beware. Far better make full ex- 

 periment with 50 or at most 100 acres than rash in, 

 , because everyone else is doing so, for 200 or 300 acres 

 under tea. 



There must on every average estate be patches, 

 if not fields of coffee in better heart than the rest, 

 and these ought to be worth the experiment of 

 being surrounded by tea, protected possibly hereafter 

 from the hemikla spores which have in the past 

 spread unchecked over the uninterrupted expanses of 

 coffee. If, as is expected, a steady turn upwards 

 for coffee prices and the crisis iu Brazil are drawing 

 near, we may yet see not a few Ceylon proprietors 

 regretting their too hasty supercessiou of fairly de- 

 cent coffee by tea. 



But there is another aud more serious clement of 

 risk attending the present "rush" into tea. We refer 

 to the quality of the seed used aud on this point we 

 draw attention to two letters in our Correspondence 

 column today. One of these deals with the character of 

 seed locally gathered fn m young immature trees in 

 some cases, and very properly refers to the lesson 

 learnt from coffee-planting ten years ago, as well as 

 to that from the subsequent rush into ciuchona plant- 

 ing. The other writer — a Ceylon planter on a visit 

 to Assam — declares that tea-seed is now being sent 

 to Ceylon from Assam which no Indian planter would 

 look at; — that, while Assam planters pay K150 a 

 maund for the privilege of picking the fully ripe 

 seed of the jat they approve. Ceylon importers will 

 pay no moie than from B30 to R50 per maund. 

 iSuch seed is, of course, meant to sell, not to pro- 

 duce good healthy plants ; a^d it is even 

 whispered that seed (absolute trash) has been imported 

 here at a good deal less than thiity rupees 

 per maund. Such importers ought (o be shown up; 

 but planters have themselves to blame, for they 

 can well judge from the |irieo that the article sold 

 to them cannot be relied on, and tar better to 

 buy fewer maunds of really good seed aud be con- 

 tent with a small acreage of reliable tea than 

 to scatter weak plants, the product of poor seed, 

 over a large area. Of course, there will be pro- 

 prietors now as iu 1876 whose chief object in 

 planting will be not to grow heavy crops, and so 



