and Magazine of the Ceylon Agricultural Society.— June, 1910. 567 



COCOA AND COCONUT PRODUCTION 

 IN 1 909: IN TH E PHILIP PINE ISLANDS 



The British Acting Cousul General at Manila 

 (Mr ELS Gordon) has forwarded the following 

 particulars of the production of cocoa and coco- 

 nuts in the Philippine Islands in 1908 and 1909. 

 the statistics given bsing based on information 

 supplied by the Bureau of Agriculture :— 



Cocoa. — Cebu is the chief cocoa producing pro- 

 vince, the output in 1909 being 94,491 lb.; Orien- 

 nal Negros came next with 49,680 lb., and Pan- 

 gasinan with 20,135 lb. The area under culti- 

 vation was 4,509 acres in 1909, as against 3,477 acres 

 in 1908. The total production of cocoa was 334,094 

 lb. in 1909, as compared with 210,859 lb. in 1908. 



CocoNaTS. — The principal coconut producing 

 provinces are those bordering on the Pacific 

 Coast, with the exception of La Laguna, which 

 produced last year over 20 per cent, of the total 

 output of the Islands. The total production 

 of the Islands amounted to 103,8213 tons in 1909, 

 as compared with 102,847 tons in 1908. 



The Director of the Bureau states that con- 

 siderable experimental planting of coffee and 

 cocoa has been going on during the pastfewyeais, 

 and the output in the near future should show the 

 effects of this.— Board of Trade Journal, May 12. 



THE FOOD VAL UE OF C OCONUT MILK. 



There is an enormous amount of waste of valu- 

 able food material in India in one direction or 

 another. This is because people do not know 

 the food- value of the material thus wasted. One 

 such is the water, or milk, of the coconut. 

 During the hot months of the year in Bengal, 

 but in Calcutta especially, the people consume 

 large quantities of the water in the young coco- 

 nut, called ■' Dawbs." It is asserted that the 

 water of one or two " dawbs " enables a poor 

 man to go without solid food for a day. To 

 test the truth of this a reference was made by us 

 to Mr. D Hooper, f.c.s., of the Economic 

 Museum, Calcutta, who has very kindly supplied 

 the following interesting information : — ' I have 

 made no analyses of coconut milk, but it has 

 often been examined by chemists in other parts 

 of the world. Professor Van Slyke in America, 

 for instance, examined the milk of unripe and 

 ripe nuts, and found the following constituents : 





Milk from 



Milk from 





Unripe nuts. 



Ripe nuts. 



Water 



04.37 



91.23 



Ash 



.61 



1.06 



Glucose 



3.97 



trace 



Cane sugar 



trace 



4.42 



Proteids 



13 



29 



Fat 



.12 



.14 



You will thus see that the m 



ilk contains all 



the elements of nutrition — proteids, fat, sugar 

 and mineral matter. The milk of the ripe nut 

 contains more proteids and ash, and, strangely 

 enough, the sugar becomes changed in the pro- 

 cess of ripening from amorphous glucose to cry- 

 stalline cane sugar." It is the milk of the ripe 

 nut that is wasted in such large quantities in 

 the markets of Calcutta especially, and in Ben- 

 gal generally. If some process could be discov- 

 ered of preserving this milk intact, a highly nut- 

 ritious beverage would be added to our dietary. 

 — Englishman, March 11. 



ESTATE CULTIVATION: THEORETI- 

 CAL AND PRACTICAL. 



In response to a request that he should supply 

 information on the subject of estate cultivation, 

 Mr. J. A. Holmes, of the Experimental Sta- 

 tion, Peradeniya, has sent the "Times of 

 Ceylon" in response to an enquiry following infor- 

 mation gleaned from the observations ofthe most 

 eminent agriculturists, theoretical and practical ;- 



The relative value of manures may be arrived 

 at either by regarding their relative effect on 

 crops, or by reference to the market price of 

 their constituents ; the two methods do not 

 necessarily give the same result, though they 

 naturally tend to agreement. Wagner, as the 

 result of numerous experiments with nitrogenous 

 manures applied to crops, and continued for 

 several years, gives the relative value of nitrogen 

 in various forms as follows : — 



Nitrate of sodium .. 100 



Sulphate of ammonium .. 90 



Green crops . . 70 

 Steamed bone dust, fish manure, meat guano 60 



Farmyard manure .. 45 



Wool dust ... 30 



Powdered leather .. 20 



Whilst the land is continuously covered by vege- 

 tation the loss of nitrates by drainage will be 

 reduced to a minimum. The accumulated nitro- 

 gen will be chiefly in the form of grass roots and 

 stems, and humus. W hen such land is forked, 

 the vegetable matter and humus are oxidised, 

 and gradually yield their nitrogen as nitric acid; 

 the ash constituents which they contained are 

 at the same time liberated, and become once more 

 available as plant food. The nitrogen collected 

 is kept in an insoluble form, as vegetable mattert 

 and consequently cannot be washed away, bur 

 accumulates in the surface soil to a greate, 

 extent than is possible m clean-weeded land. 

 Humus is also produced inconsiderable quantity. 



Leguminous crops have a special power of 

 acquiring nitrogen from the atmosphere by 

 means of their root-tubercles, and are hence of 

 the greatest value. The accumulation of nitro- 

 gen in the surface soil in the form of roots, 

 stubble, and decayed vegetable matter is, in the 

 case of a good crop of green manure, so con- 

 siderable that the whole of the above-ground 

 growth may be removed and the land yet 

 remain greatly enriched with nitrogen. The 

 growth of leguminous crops is the most impor- 

 tant means which a planter possesses for en- 

 riching his land with nitrogen. The character- 

 istic advantage of green manuring lies, however, 

 in the large amount of humus which the soil 

 acquires. All the carbon which the crop has 

 obtained from the atmosphere is incorporated 

 with the soil. Green manuring is thus especially 

 adapted for light, sandy soils, which need humus 

 to increase their retentive power. It is em- 

 ployed with great advantage to fertilise barren 

 soils in hot climates. Leguminous crops are 

 clarly to be preferred before all others for the 

 purpose of green manuring, as in their case 

 nitrogen is obtained from the atmosphere. 



It may also be of interest to planters to know 

 that the ordinary clean-weeded, drained rubber 

 slope, if the washed soil is not caught in pits 

 and redistributed about the land, loses well over 

 H200 worth of manurial constituents per annum. 



