Edible Products. 



168 



Our confreres in Trinidad will hardly ever get this matter satisfactorily 

 settled until they adopt some plan of percentage delivery. For instance, if the 

 prospective campaign should be one of a hundred working days, then the cane 

 farmers, to be placed upon an equality with the planter's own supply of cane, 

 should be allowed to deliver one per cent, of his crop on each working day. A 

 party with 100 tons from this point of view could only deliver one ton per day. 

 When the deliveries are made very small they may become unremunerative to the 

 farmer, owing to the difficulty that he would have in organizing his domestic force 

 for so small a delivery. In that case local farmers could be taught to club together 

 and work for each other, exchanging in kind or for price. In this way, a farmer 

 restricted to but one ton delivery per day, joining with four others, they 

 unitedly could deliver five tons from one of the party each day, and in five days 

 complete the circle of deliveries and giving the same results to the factory. 



We have been led to infer that some of the opposition that has developed 

 in Trinidad to the cane farming industry has been from the fact that the cane 

 farming diverted a considerable amount of good labour from the planting industry 

 over into the cane farming industry, and the interference was so great as to be 

 considered actually injurious. This may be the case in Trinidad, but, as referred 

 to above in the instance of the beet sugar factories, so it is with most factories. 

 They won't go into business unless they have assurances of a competent supply of 

 the raw material to handle. The margin in the production of sugar to-day is so 

 small that an immense supply of cane is required, and experience in Louisiana and 

 in Cuba has shown that the development of the cane farming industry is an 

 essential feature of the central factory idea in sugar production. — The Louisiana 

 Planter, 



GUAVA FRUIT PULP. 



Although the remarkable fecundity and capacity for reproduction of the 

 guava has earned for this plant an unenviable reputation almost equal to that 

 bestowed upon the less useful lantana, for taking possession of pasture land, yet 

 there is very little doubt that if properly attended to, a very profitable return might 

 be derived from the fruit. In many of the outlying districts of the islands, upon 

 land which has either been abandoned to this plant and those of similar capacity for 

 encroachment, or upon tracts which have heretofore been uncultivated on account of 

 their sterility, enormous quantities of wholesome fruits are allowed to go waste. This 

 might all be used to profitable advantage if a system of fruit-pulping were intro- 

 duced similar to that which is employed in many of the agricultural districts of 

 France. The general scope of the method suggested is for the local growers or pickers 

 to preserve the guava pulp in large containers, by an inexpensive and simple plan, 

 and in this form to send it to a central jelly factory for future use. 



The pulping is in France usually conducted on a large scale, but it should also 

 be as easily and advantageously carried on with smaller quantities of fruit. The 

 apparatus used consists merely of a copper pan and a metal tank. The fruit to be 

 pulped should, after removal of the rind, be placed in the copper pan and heated to 

 boiling, during which process it should be continually stirred with a wooden spoon. 

 After boiling for a sufficient time it should then be emptied into tin containers which 

 are soldered up. The tins are then removed to the metal tank in which they are 

 immersed in boiling water for about twenty minutes. During this process, if any of 

 the tins are not sufficiently soldered it will be detected, and in this case they must be 

 removed, The quality of the product depends on the degree of cleanliness observed, 

 in the care which is exercised to prevent burning during the process of boiling, in the 

 kind of tins employed and in the manner of soldering. If thoroughly cleansed kero- 



