168 AGRICULTURE IN THE TROPICS [PT. Ill 



among its members, but they will get increased profit from the 

 better crops. 



A society starting upon these lines should of course attend 

 at first to rice, or coconuts, or whatever may be the principal 

 crops of the district, but once the society is well upon its legs, 

 and the villagers have come to believe in it, and not to think 

 it some ingenious mechanism for defrauding them, it may begin 

 to get seed of the less familiar crops perhaps from the larger 

 experimental gardens kept up by the Government and to 

 distribute these. There are also special cases in which it 

 might, in cooperation with other societies, obtain seeds from 

 Europe or from other countries. 



The next point to be considered is the possibility of im- 

 proving native methods in agriculture. There can be no doubt 

 that such improvement is possible, but it is above all important 

 to know exactly what we are doing, and to recommend no 

 method without being certain of its superiority. Agriculture 

 is a complex art, and a change in any one item of a process of 

 cultivation may bring entirely unforeseen and possibly disastrous 

 changes in other items in its train, as was instanced on p. 47. 



Another formidable obstacle to any change in methods is 

 custom. The tropical native is usually conservative, and objects 

 to any interference with his time-honoured ways. Thus, for 

 example, among the Javanese and the Malays, one may see 

 side by side the advanced methods of transplanting the rice, 

 and rotating the crop with others, and the inefficient method 

 of harvesting it by cutting each ear separately. Yet this is 

 tenaciously adhered to, because the harvest time is the great 

 festive season, when all the young folk turn out into the fields, 

 and engagements are mainly contracted. In some parts of 

 Southern India the ryots plant their cotton with a drill, in 

 rows; in others they plant it by broadcast sowing, getting a 

 less return from more seed and labour. If a ryot in the latter 

 districts be questioned, he will often admit that the former 

 method is the better, but " it is not the custom " is his reply to 

 the natural enquiry why he does not adopt it. 



Another great obstacle is the indolence of the peasant. He 

 may know quite well that a particular method is better than 



