and Magazine of the Ceylon Agricultural Society. 



573 



the average proportion for the year, if all the 

 scrap is duly collected ? I have figures before 

 me, giving in one case 5 per cent and in 

 another 40 per cent ; but I feel sure that these 

 are both extreme. Can any of your correspon- 

 dents indicate what should be looked on as a fair 

 standard of proportion. 



Colombo, Dec. 3rd. 



Dear Sir, — I am very much obliged to your 

 correspondent " H. V. A.'' for the interesting 

 particulars in his letter. 



I note well the pregnance of his closing para 

 but the question is still that which 1 pro- 

 pounded in my first letter, viz : What does 

 "hardly any scrap" in his case amount to — as 

 a percentage on the whole crop':'— Yours faith- 

 fully, C. W. H. 



THE TEA INDUSTRY AND LABOUR- 

 SAVING MACHINERY. 



Now that crops have proved a full success and 

 there is a promise of fat years to come, food 

 must become cheaper. The recruiting of coolies 

 will become more difficult. Fewer coolies will be 

 recruited and these not of the best. It behoves 

 the Tea Industry, therefore, to look round 

 and see in which way labour can be saved, by 

 the use of machinery. Railways are slowly 

 opening out the best coolie recruiting districts, 

 Chota Nagpur and the Central Provinces. The 

 aboriginal coolie is finding employment in 

 other directions than tea. Coal and other mines, 

 though not liked as much as the tea garden, 

 are taking away numbers of coolies, being 

 closer to their homes and offering better pay. 

 If measures are not adopted to employ machi- 

 nery in field work, there is disaster awaiting a 

 number of gardens which are bound to go out 

 of cultivation. The poor China gardens will 

 suffer first and then the poor Hybrid and poor 

 soil gardens. Although machinery iB used in 

 all processes of manufacture, and every year 

 sees new improved machinery for use in the 

 factory, planters still rely on the hoe for cul- 

 tivation and fingers for plucking. No effort has 

 been made to bring the field works into line 

 with the modern factory. We still go on in 

 the garden in the style of Noah. Engineering 

 genius has made marvellous strides in the 

 factory, but has given the field work no 

 thought, though there is an enormous and 

 profitable field to work on, in the tea field. 

 Let us turn to agricultural machinery and see 

 in what way tea can use the machinery now ex- 

 istent. If you were to ask a planter why plough- 

 ing was not suitable for tea, he would tell you it 

 tears up the roots and smashes the bushes, but 

 if you point out that coolie hoeing cuts up the 

 roots also, he says no ; but the coolie if watched 

 does cut up roots, quickly buries them and leaves 

 no trace. With ploughing it i3 different ; the 

 plough does tear up feeder-roots and the man in 

 charge has no means of covering them up. As 

 regards knocking about bushes it is due to badly 

 trained cattle. A well-trained pair of bullocks 

 can cultivate Indian com or jute planted one 



foot apart; why not tea planted 3 to 6 feet apart? 

 Leaving the question of ploughing with bullocks 

 and turning to machinery, there is no reason 

 why steam traction, oil or motor engines with 

 the drum and coil of rope should not be used in 



PLOUGHING TEA, 



as they are used in other countries. Of 

 course the ploughs would have to be adapted 

 to the work, probably a middle breaker 

 with right and left hand ploughs on each side 

 could easily plough a row of teas, doing three to 

 four feet furrows. Then again the middle brea- 

 ker with a subsoil plough could do trench hoeing, 

 and even drawing could be done by drawing 

 ploughs. This would cover the heavy hoeing work 

 performed now by men, who year by year as 

 the call for labour is getting louder are getting 

 scarcer and are going off to lighter jobs when the 

 season for deep hoeing comes. Again for light 

 hoeing there are the cultivators 1 tools that can 

 both till up and take away the earth from a plant 

 as wanted. Of course, those would have shields 

 adjusted to them to protect the bushes. This 

 could easily be done. Ploughs of this sort could 

 not be drawn by bullock traction and would, of 

 course, have to be worked by powerful engines 

 of at least 30 break horse power, while even 50 

 to 60 b h p would not come amiss at times. In- 

 stead of manuring by hand a manure spreader 

 could be employed, or a drill could be used be- 

 hind the cultivator or ploughs for the more con- 

 centrated manures. It has been the want of 

 these powerful engines that has made the 

 ploughing of tea seem impossible. The "no 

 innovation," old style planter will, of course, 

 say these ploughs could not be worked in old 

 tea, as they would rip up any bushes that were 

 not planted in the straight. This may be so, 

 but it would be better to knock out the few 

 bushes not in the straight than to allow the 

 whole lot to suffer for the want of cultivation. 

 Of course, using these ploughs does not mean 

 that we would be able to get rid of all manual 

 labour; ferns and jungle in the bushes would 

 have to be taken out by hand. This can be done 

 even by children in most cases and would only 

 need men where a garden had beed shamefully 

 neglected. Turning to pruning, this is a more 

 difficult operation; but there is 



NO REASON WHY TOP LIGHT PRUNING SHOULD 

 NOT BE DONE BY 80ME REAPING OR HOEING 

 MACHINE, 



Collar pruning, of course, could be worked 

 by horizontal saws with a light motor engine. 

 This, no doubt, would be neater and cheaper 

 than the present tackling of the work with 

 big pruning knives, dows, kookries etc. Pluc- 

 king could also be performed by some such 

 contrivance as a reaping or mowing machine. 

 Such a machine,of course, would rip everything 

 off the bush, and arrangements would have to 

 be made in the factory to separate the coarse 

 from the fine or the garden would go in for a 

 coarse grade of cheap tea. In many cases it would 

 bo more profitable to rip everything off the 

 bush, than to allow, as is now very often the 

 case, the bush to overgrow itself in the height 

 of the season when there is more growth than 

 the labour force can tackle, and then quickly 

 shut up at the end of the season. 



