CHAPTER X 

 BANANA SOILS IN JAMAICA 



THE following facts about banana soils in Jamaica 

 may be helpful in showing how much can be done to 

 improve and make productive even the most unpromising 

 soils. 



" In the early stages * of the industry in Jamaica 

 1 banana land ' was accepted to mean a soil in which 

 without drainage, without tillage, and by a superficial 

 process of clearing and, perhaps, burning, before the 

 suckers were planted a good yield of commercial fruit was 

 obtainable by the grace of Nature alone. Where fine 

 alluvial deposit has been reinforced with the humus from 

 a prolonged growth of forest or ruinate, and the district 

 is a seasonable one, such old-fashioned ' banana land ' is 

 still to be found in Jamaica, but in rapidly decreasing 

 extent. To a superficial observer of the initial conditions 

 of the banana industry in Jamaica it might have seemed 

 as though the banana was pre-eminently a product of 

 virgin soils, and that as the first flush of the stored fertility 

 of these soils became exhausted the growing of bananas 

 would be difficult, if not impossible. Under these con- 

 ditions the vast area of virgin soil on the Spanish Main 

 would appear certain to displace the resources of so small 

 and long settled an island as Jamaica for the profitable 

 cultivation of the banana. 



" Jamaica, however, in starting the banana industry 

 had behind its resources the traditions and enterprise of 

 many generations of English and Scottish agriculturists of 



* Bull. Dept. of Agric., New Series, i. 221 (1911). 

 56 



