TENURE AND USE OF l.AND. 109 



same year. Then the lield is sown for the next spring with spring plants, mainly rice and 

 sorghum, and also in small quantities, cotton and lucerne. The harvests in the irrigated lands 

 both of Semipalatinsk and Semirechensk produce very heavy yields, and crop failure are 

 unknown. The grain raised on the Irrigated lands not only suffices for the uses of the farmers, 

 hut a portion of it goes for sale to China and the nearest Kirghiz nomads. 



In the Amour territory a strict distinction must he made between the farming of the 

 Russian population, peasant and Cossack, and that of the natives. Coreans and Manchurians. 

 The Russians practise an extremely extensive system of farming, the newly cleared arable 

 land is ploughed over several times during a whole year, and is then annually sown with 

 grain without fallow or manure until it is completely exhausted. The best clayey soils thus 

 are made to yield as many as fifteen crops, one after another, poor soils not more than seven 

 or eight. During the first years after the clearing, wheat or spring rye is sown, next a passage is 

 made to oats, and then for a year or two, buckwheat. After the last, a crop which somewhat 

 reestablishes the fertility of the soil, they again sow wheat or spring rye, followed by oats, 

 until the latter ceases to produce satisfactory crops. Fields once abandoned are very seldom 

 ploughed up afresh, although they might after a rest yield very fair crops. It is the custom to 

 break up, almost exclusively, fresh hitherto untouched lands, of which up till now, on account 

 of the recent settlement of the country, there is no lack. The yields of grain are in a quanti- 

 tative respect very high, but the quality of the Amour grain is far from satisfactory. The 

 excess of moisture prevents the regular ripening of the grain, which is dark, of light weight 

 and of low nutritive value. 



The same character on the whole attaches to Russian agriculture in the Ussuri region 

 except that in order to avoid soaking, sowing is here carried on in rows in the form of 

 small ridges, the furrows remaining between them serving as drains and for ventilation. 



As far as concerns the Coreans and Manchurians living in Amouria their farming, in 

 opposition to the Russian, is distinguished by great intensiveness. The size of the cultivated 

 plots is not great, but on the other hand the fields are most carefully tilled, the sowing is 

 in rows by hand or machine; the young plants are weeded several times during the summer, so 

 that weeds are hardly to be seen on the fields of the Coreans and Manchurians. while they 

 are such a dangerous enemy of the crops of the Russian population. The chief crop among 

 the Coreans and Manchurians is buda (setaria Italica); next follow various other cereals and 

 garden plants; buda is also their chief food. An expenditure of eighteen to twenty pounds of 

 seed on a dessiatine gives one hundred and fifty to two hundred ponds or more, so that the 

 yield of one dessiatine provides a whole family for a year, or a year and a half. 



Having finished the description of the principal systems of agriculture existing in Si- 

 beria, it is necessary to proceed to the consideration of the statistics of its present position. 

 «The Chernoziom constitutes^, says Erehm «the true gold of Siberia->. And in fact agriculture 

 is now the chief and safest occupation of the settled Siberian, and in it consists the whole 

 future of the country. It may be assumed that from the whole territory of Siberia there is, 

 on an average, harvested about 160,000,000 pouds of various grains, of which approximately 

 20 per cent fall to Tobolsk and Tomsk, as the most densely populated, 12 to 15 per cent to 

 Yeniseisk and Irkutsk and Semirechia, 3 to 5 per cent to each of the territories of Semi- 



