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The Supplement to the Tropical Agriculturist 



RUBBER PLANTING IN THE STRAITS. 



AN INTERVIEW WITH MR. E. V. CAREY. 



Mr. E. V. Carey, the woll-known rubber 

 planter of the Straits, was spent a fortnight in 

 Ceylon on his way home, was good enough to 

 give a Ceylon Observer representative a full ac- 

 count of the present conditions and future pros- 

 pects of rubber planting in the parts which he 

 has just visited. Everything, it seems, was 

 flourishing extraordinarily in the Straits and 

 things were going on satisfactorily in every way. 



CROTALARIA AND PASSION FLOWER. 



One question was greatly interesting planters 

 there, that of growing crotalaria and passion 

 flower. " Personally," he said, "I don't think 

 there is any one of them to be compared to 

 clean weeding, simply on the score that on a 

 clean estate a manager can supervise a very 

 much larger area of land. Management is none 

 too easy a question and to have the burden of 

 attending to these different products, that are 

 planted to keep weeds down, means an 

 enormous amount of extra supervision. In 

 some cases out there you see crotalaria over 

 a man's head and it is impossible to supervise 

 a gang of coolies working in stuff standing over 

 their heads. How about 



Mimosa ? 



I don't think there's a single advocate of 

 mimosa in the country. It is full of thorns, 

 which cause coolies' feet to ulcer badly, and alto- 

 gether, as far as I can judge, it is quite an 

 undesirable thing as compared with passion 

 creeper. There is a good deal to be said for 

 the passion creeper as long as it is the fashion 

 at whatever cost to try and thoroughly clean 

 land of weeds, which are probably in themselves 

 almost harmless, such as small - needle grass, 

 and the plant known as valacha which Ceylon 

 planters know very well. From what I 

 saw, passion creeper on land which is extraordi- 

 narily expensive to weed, and I am not inclu- 

 ding lalang in that, ought to be a very useful 

 thing indeed. It is very easily cultivated on 

 most lands and very easily exterminated; and 

 there is no doubt that it kills all the weeds 

 under it. It forms a tremendous thick blanket 

 on the ground and the weeds don't have a 

 chance with it. They are simply choked. I have 

 not sufficient experience to say that it is going 

 to do an extraordinary amount 



To Keep Lalang Down. 

 1 was told in one place in which the lalang 

 had been cut out, and probably not properly 

 eradicated, that the passion creeper had taken 

 a tremendous hold to start with ; but that after 

 some time the lalang began to shoot up through 

 it. I think that most old planters feel that 

 clean weeding is the best thing, and next to 

 that this passion creeper. Crotalaria does not 

 seem to kill weeds, although it chokes them. 



Tapping. 



And how about the tapping yield ? 



The tapping yield is all that could possibly 

 be expected, and better. Tapping on most estates 

 that I saw was very carefully done and all the 



men that I spoke to seemed to take a very 

 keen and intelligent interest in the whole thing, 

 especially in the way in which the trees were 

 treated, and they have the old Ceylon spirit of 

 thoroughly discussing and thrashing things out. 



The Northway System. 

 There is a lot of talk about the new Northway 

 system of tapping, although nobody has any 

 data to go upon. The general feeling seems to 

 be that it is impossible to handle the pricker so 

 carefully that it won't penetrate the cambium 

 and wound the wood. Our experience has been 

 that wherever the wood is wounded, you get a 

 knotty uneven development of the bark and stem, 

 instead of a smooth healed surface; and a good 

 many men appear to fear that people who com- 

 mit themselves to the new pricking system may 

 possibly create a condition of things in the 

 shape of the trees which will render any ordinary 

 methods of tapping by knives practically an 

 impossibility in the future. I have no per- 

 sonal experience of any of this suggested 

 daager in connection with the Northway 

 system of pricking and I only repeat what 

 people say and seem to fear, my own expe- 

 rience being confined to the definite knowledge 

 of what results from wounds generally but 

 not particularly in connection with pricking. 

 It seems to me that we get very satisfactory 

 yields indeed; with a minimum of damage to 

 the trees, by the ordinary shaving process, and 

 I think that the adoption of this new idea is 

 rather a case of forsaking the substance for 

 the shadow. I will not allow it on any estate 

 with which I have anything to do although I 

 shall, of course, be very glad to benefit by the 

 experience of others. 



The Yield Under the Existing System. 



Can you give me any figures as to yield under 

 the existing tapping system ? 



Well, I can tell you that, on one estate, trees 

 which are from seven to nine years old are now 

 considered to be in full tapping order, and 

 are yielding an 



AVERAGE OF SEVEN POUNDS A TREE. 



I can also tell you that at my own place I am 

 getting this year 400 lb an acre from trees plan- 

 ted 10 by 10 which are 5£ to 6$ years old. The 

 feeling out there seems to be that in close 

 planted rubber the renewal later becomes thin 

 because it appears to be in direct proportion to 

 the leaf head that the tree carries, and therefore 

 it soems likely that in my own particular case, 

 10 by 10 planting, thore will have to be thinning 

 out in the future. 



The Number of Coolies Required, 



How many coolies do you want for an acre? 



At the present moment I have a force amoun- 

 ting to one cooly an acre. I have 187 acres being 

 tapped and I have a force of under 200 coolies 

 all told. These coolies, in addition to working 

 all that, also weed another 275 acres, roughly, 

 and keep them in order. The whole opened 

 area is 450 acres and I have at present a force of 

 something like 200 coolies. That, however, is 

 insufficient and I am going to double my force, 

 because I believe that one should always have a 

 considerable margin of labour, for the reason 



