V 



FIELD CULTURE 



141 



does it permanent injury, the situation will be reversed 

 after three or four years, that is, almost immediately 

 after the abaca begins to yield good crops. From this 

 time on, the abaca is shaded by coco-nuts. Shaded 

 abaca will never yield as good returns as abaca" which 

 receives the whole of the sunshine, and uses the whole 

 of the sunshine in the building up of its fibres. More- 

 over, abaca is a crop of uncertain value. There are 

 years when its price is so low that it hardly pays to 

 harvest the fibre, and there is no return for the work 

 which it has taken to bring it to maturity. There are 

 other times when it pays handsome returns, and if one 

 is counting on his returns at this time of high prices, 

 he can certainly not afford to cut them in two by 

 shading his abaca with coco-nuts. Finally, both the 

 abaca and the coco-nuts are surface feeders. Before 

 either one has yielded any crops, their roots will be in 

 active competition and doing each other mutual harm. 



In spite of all these considerations, some abaca 

 planters maintain that their abaca cannot be expected 

 to return crops of fibre for more than ten or twelve 

 years, and that unless they have interplanted the 

 coco-nuts they will then have nothing of value on the 

 land, and that even rather inferior coco-nut trees are 

 much more valuable than nothing whatever. The 

 latter contention must be granted, but the former is 

 not true. Abaca which is given proper cultural treat- 

 ment will certainly continue to give big crops for at 

 least twenty -five years ; this I know from actual 

 observation, and there was no reason to suspect that 

 the plantation which had given good returns for 

 twenty-five years might not continue to do so for as 

 much longer. 



My own preference in the choice of a catch-crop, 

 if it is possible to utilize it, is manioc. Manioc is an 

 exceedingly heavy producer and can be made to pay 

 a very large return for the use of the land. This can 

 be done either by feeding the roots to stock, which 

 however can ' be recommended only with certain 



