NOTES ON CACAO CULTIVATION EXPERIMENTS. 



By Professor P. CARMODY, F.I.C., F.C.S. 

 Director of Agriculture, Trinidad. 



TRINIDAD has long been renowned for the quality of 

 its cacao, and it has attained this position through the 

 suitability of its soil and climate for the growth of cacao 

 and through the skill and care employed in the prepara- 

 tion of the bean for the market. Although its area is 

 less than 2,000 square miles, until 1910 it headed the list 

 of British possessions for the quantity of cacao exported. 

 It is the principal industry of the Colony, and in recent 

 years experiments on a large scale have been started with 

 the object of increasing the production by improvements 

 in the methods of cultivation. This paper gives a few 

 of the results obtained in the preliminary stages of the 

 experiments, and it is hoped that they may be of some 

 interest to those engaged in cacao cultivation. It also 

 includes a reference to the various schemes for promoting 

 agricultural education that have been introduced since 

 1900. No reference is made to the experiments in the 

 removal of shade, the removal of suckers, or in wider 

 planting, in grafting and budding, and in seed selection, 

 as some years must elapse before definite results can be 

 obtained. Only a passing reference is made to the 

 manurial experiments for the same reason. The Govern- 

 ment fortunately owns an estate on which experiments 

 on a large scale can be made, and the greater part of 

 the experiments are carried out there. In several 

 privately owned estates in different districts small-scale 

 experiments are being made under the supervision of 

 officers of the Department of Agriculture. The estates 

 record the results of these experiments. Altogether over 

 90 acres of cacao are included in the experiments. 



