CHAPTER XI. 



HARVESTING AND STORAGE, AND PESTS OF STOKED MAIZE. 1 



. . . when the Autumn 

 Changed the long green leaves to yellow, 

 And the soft and juicy kernels 

 Grew like wampum hard and yellow, 

 Then the ripened ears he gathered, 

 Stripped the withered husks from off them, 

 As he had once stripped the wrestler. 



And they called the women round them, 

 Called the young men and the maidens, 

 To the harvest of the corn-fields, 

 To the husking of the maize-ear. 



— Hiawatha. 



Now the broad fields of maize are cut and the maize-cobs garnered. 



— Crawford. 



420. Maize Harvesting. — The usual method of harvesting chap 

 maize in South Africa, before the acreage reached its present 

 extent, was to pick the ears by hand as the stalks stood in the 

 field, after the ears had become thoroughly sun-dried. Native 

 labour, alone, has been employed for this work. But with 

 increased development in agriculture, mining and manufactures, 

 native labour is becoming scarcer and consequently more ex- 

 pensive, and the necessity for adopting other methods of 

 handling the crop is becoming apparent. A case has been 

 reported within the last few years where, when the new 

 planting season came round, it found the last crop not entirely 

 harvested, owing to lack of labour ; another case came to 

 the notice of the writer in which harvesting was only com- 

 pleted the day before the planting of the new crop was begun. 



1 Much of the information on the use of maize-harvesting machinery in 

 America has been taken from a special bulletin of the United States Department 

 of Agriculture (Z'mthco, 1). 



451 39 * 



