34 



being reclaimed after having grown up to grass and brush for a number 

 of years. Lime is not a fertilizer within itself but has the power of 

 decomposing vegetable substances and disintegrating heav}^ compact soils 

 so as to make the plant food they contain readily available. 



The older soils, which have been cultivated in cane for many years 

 should receive liberal applications of the decomposed vegetable matter, 

 such as cane leaves, bagasse, grass, refuse from the barnyard, and animal 

 manures. A system commonly practiced in Negros is to keep all of the 

 work cattle used on the fann in a temporary corral at night and as soon 

 as the land has become heavily coated with manure the corral is moved 

 to a new site and cane is planted in the old corral where it gives excellent 

 yields. Any decayed vegetable matter, trash, or waste about the farm 

 will prove valuable if applied to cane fields. 



There are at present proljably only two native fertilizing materials 

 which are likely to prove of material value in sugar growing. One of 

 these is bat guano, found to a limited extent in mountain caves where the 

 large tropical bats roost, but unfortunately many of these deposits are 

 so located as to be inaccessible to transportation. Analyses of a large 

 number of samples tend to show that most of them have been subjected 

 to leaching by seepage of water tlirough the soft rock constituting the 

 Toof and walls of the caves. 



The other is copra cake, the resulting press cake after the extraction 

 of the oil from the ground and dried meat of the coconut. It is a fairly 

 satisfactory' nitrogenous fertilizer, resembling in some respects cotton- 

 seed meal so commonly used on sugar cane in Louisiana and the other 

 southern States. 



The filter press cake from modern sugar mills is generally utilized as 

 a low grade fertilizing material by returning it to the fields from which 

 it came. It can be transported in carts or on tramways but a more 

 economical m.eans of returning it where irrigation is used is to grind the 

 cake, put it into the irrigation ditches and run it back to the fields in the 

 irrigation water. Low grade molasses, which is not salable, is often 

 returned to the fields, especially where it can be carried by the irrigation 

 water. 



CULTIVATIOX. 



Clearing the land. — New lands planted to sugar cane in the Philippines 

 are usually covered with a heavj' growth of dense, tall, tropical grasses, 

 sometimes a scattered growth of scrub brush, and occasionally tropical 

 forest. The operation of clearing is comparatively simple if nothing but 

 cogon grass (Imperata cylindrica Koenigii Bentham) is growing on the 

 land, and consists primarily in burning it off during the dry season. The 

 burning can be facilitated by running a harrow, drag, or roller over the 

 grass, especially if it consists of the coarser kinds like talajib {Saccharum 

 spontaneum indicum Hackel) . The land should not be burned over much 



