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DRY-FARMING CONGRESS, WICHITA, 1914 



be good, and certainly should not take so long to season and dry out as that 

 grown on moister soil. 



My old friend, the Mudaliyar Rajapakse, of Negombo, Ceylon, has been 

 busy. Together with other Colombo capitalists, this progressive agricultur- 

 ist has been buying about 2,000 acres or more of land in the Puttalam dis- 

 trict of Ceylon, and hopes to secure another 3,000 acres where, by means 

 of modern agricultural implements, and the help of dry-farming methods, 

 he means to overcome local labor difficulties and cause the land, which 

 is situated in the dry zone, to give a fair yield of cocoanuts, and, there- 

 fore, of copra to the acre. When I met Mr. Lyne at the International Con- 

 gress in London, he very kindly promised to discuss the question of the 

 Wanni and of dry-farming in Ceylon generally, with me, but unfortunately 

 the outbreak of the war caused him to have to leave hurriedly in order 

 to get back to his work in time, and so I missed a valuable lesson or two. 

 I can, however, say that Mr. Lyne considers the increased cultivation of oil 

 products may be expected to play a large part in the future tropical devel- 

 opment generally, wherever conditions can be made suitable and that with 

 the help of the experience gained elsewhere with dry-farming, the cultivation 

 of oil-yielding palms, etc., may yet help to solve the problem of what to do 

 with the dry-zone area in Ceylon; and if so there, why not elsewhere? The 

 experiments, Mr. Lyne claims, that have been carried out at the Govern- 

 ment station at Maha Illupallama already referred to, which is situated in 

 the middle of Ceylon, illustrate decisively what can be achieved with cocoa- 

 nuts in such a type of country by the application of some of the principles 

 of dry-farming in con junction with a little irrigation, and this not only with 

 the cocoanut (cocos nucifera) but also with the oil-palm (elaeis guincensis.) 



Lectures given by Mr. Ramasawmy Iyer, of the Agricultural College, 

 on "Dry Cultivation" (in Southern India, I think it was in Tiruppur), have 

 been followed, the Madras Mail tells us, with considerable interest and at- 

 tention by a large gathering of ryots, to whom Mr. Iyer explained how they 

 could make dry cultivation more paying by adopting better methods of till- 

 ing, and by the employment of improved methods of cultivation generally, 

 and more especially by the use of improved ploughs. After the lectures 

 there were, in some cases, ploughing demonstrations which were witnessed 

 by a number of ryots. 



I would like to mention one point here, and that is the advantage of 

 using explosives when subsoiling is necessary to break up hardpan, espe- 

 cially when you do not want to disturb the surface. In the old days this 

 could not be done, but today it can. Again, the removal of roots is neces- 

 sary when ploughing has to be done and disc harrows used, and here again 

 explosives can come in, coupled with a Hercules stump-puller, a Trewhella 

 monkeywinch, or other of these useful appliances to remove the stumps 

 after being blasted. Mr. A. W. Bevan, of Ceylon, writing in the "Tropical 

 Agriculturalist" for April (the organ of the Ceylon Agricultural Society), 

 tells us that "Dry-farming will not be a wholly safe practice in agriculture 

 until suitable leguminous crops are found and made part of the system. It 

 is notable that over the whole of the dry-farm territory of this and ^ther 



