COCO-NUT PRODUCTS 201 



room and very little larger, and the floor between them 

 is merely a grating. In operation the drying-room is 

 filled with trays of copra, each holding about 6 lbs. 

 Different driers have a capacity of 200 to 394 trays. 

 The local custom is said to be to remove the copra from 

 the shell without any preliminary drying, which is 

 laborious and inevitably involves breaking it into small 

 pieces. Assuming a yield of two tons a year per hec- 

 tare, a drier then will take care of the yield of 150 

 hectares. How large an area can well be made tributary 

 to one drier depends of course on the means and cost of 

 transporting the nuts, as well as on other local condi- 

 tions. In German New Guinea and the Bismarck 

 Archipelago a drier is built for eachJiectareJ- Preuss 

 states that one of them will dry 1700 lbs. of copra 

 in twenty-four hours or about 300 tons a year. The 

 temperature is kept near 50° C. When the copra is 

 taken from the drying chamber, it is spread over the 

 floor of the building to cool and to dry a little more 

 perfectly. Unless the drying is finished in this way, 

 the copra is said to mould ; but with proper treatment 

 the product is of excellent quality. One of these drying 

 houses costs 1500 to 1750 dollars. 



COCO-NUT OIL 



The manufacture of coco-nut oil as an article of 

 world commerce is not a plantation business. The 

 copra of commerce is the raw material for this business, 

 and the extraction of the oil is carried on very largely 

 in temperate countries, especially in France. For a 

 considerable time there have been a few well-equipped 

 factories at work in Ceylon, and individual establish- 

 ments have been set up in other tropical countries. Oil, 

 as an article of home consumption or of local commerce, 

 is extracted in all coco-nut countries, and may or may 

 not be a plantation product. It is only as it may be 

 a plantation industry that the extraction of the oil 

 requires explanation here. 



