THE MANURING OF BANANAS. 

 By J. C. BRUNNICH, F.I.C. 



Chemist to the Department of Agriculture and Stock, 

 Queensland. 



ON looking through the publications on banana culture, 

 one must notice the fact that the manuring of this crop 

 receives but scant treatment, and very few results of 

 manurial experiments are reported. In a recent paper 

 on " Bananas and Their Utilization " [i], which un- 

 doubtedly is an up-to-date and most comprehensive 

 treatise, the manuring of the crop gets a bare two pages 

 out of a total of 120 pages. This is not to be wondered 

 at, when we consider that hitherto in all banana-growing 

 countries the culture of the plant was of a most reckless 

 nature, a veritable " Raubbau " in the fullest sense of 

 the word, as large areas of country under bananas were 

 simply continually cropped, for years and years, without 

 any attention to manuring, and abandoned when the 

 crops, due to complete exhaustion of the soil, became 

 unprofitable. New lands had then to be taken up, cleared 

 and put under bananas. This state of affairs continued 

 as long as land of easy access and near the seaboard was 

 available. 



It was fortunate that in the State of Queensland such 

 abandoned lands were found to be eminently suitable for 

 the growth of other crops, and more particularly sugar- 

 cane, and thus the great waste of leaving large stretches 

 of fertile country uncultivated was avoided. The banana 

 industry itself, however, suffered, as from a yearly crop 

 of about 4j million bunches in 1898, it has dropped to 

 an average yield of a little over i million bunches in 

 the last few years. The cultivation, which was originally 

 entirely in the hands of Chinamen, passed more and more 

 into the hands of European farmers, and for this reason 

 it was desirable to find means to utilize old banana lands 

 again for banana culture. 



