TiErm 



TROPICAL AGRICULTURIST 



AND 



MAGAZINE OF THE 



CEYLON AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Vol. XXVI. COLOMBO, APEIL 16th, 190G. No. 3. 



Agricultural Tools. 



With the increase in cost of living that is universally going on, with the 

 great extension of rubber planting, and with the increasing demand in other 

 countries of the tropics for his services, more especially in the Federated Malay 

 States, where the chief industry is rubber, which can afford to pay higher rates 

 there must in all probability come a time when the wages of the Tamil coolie 

 employed upon estates will rise, thus making a great difference to estates planted 

 in comparatively unremunerative products like tea, cacao, or cardamoms. 



This, with other causes, will stimulate the wish to find agricultural tools 

 other than the mamoti which can be profitably employed upon estates to the saving 

 of labour. Were it not for such tools, farming would be, comparatively speaking, 

 impossible in the thinly -peopled Western United States and in many other countries. 

 In the rice fields of Texas, one man, aided by machinery, can till 80 acres a some- 

 what startling contrast to the state of affairs in Ceylon or India. 



It is absurd to suppose that complex American tools can be suddenly intro- 

 duced to a population of poor villagers, who cannot find the money to buy them 

 who do not understand them, and cannot repair them if they break, and who are 

 quite unaccustomed to their use. Yet this is the rock upon which all attempts 

 at the improvement of native implements have in the past been shattered. One 

 official, for instance, endeavoured to improve the ploughs in vogue in Ceylon by 

 introducing good English ploughs. These of course penetrated the plough-pan 

 which exists in most paddy fields, and let the water escape in consequence. The 

 result, or one of the results, is a prejudice among the villagers against improved 

 ploughs which will probably last a century or more. — 



On estates, again, though they are under European management, the labour 

 has to be performed by ignorant Tamil coolies, and matters are further complicated 

 by the hilliness of most places, which handicaps or prevents the use of the majority 

 of American tools, which are constructed for level ground. 



The individual who endeavours to go rapidly in improving tropical— or any 

 other— agriculture is, as a general rule, certain to fail, and the worst point of his 

 failure, in the tropics more especially, is the prejudice against improvement that 

 is thereby created. 



The proper way of procedure is the scientific one, advancing by very gradual 

 steps. It may be illustrated by a recent performance on the Pennsylvania Railroad 

 Thousands of men are there employed in cleaning out the roadside gutters with 



