Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/114

 "It is difficult to state the yield, more than that it is usually very abundant, often amounting to from one to several bushels on a small tree. It should also be noticed in this connection that the beans are quite bulky. One bushel weighs about twenty-one pounds."

Analyses show the high content of sugar and other nutrients and explain why the animals are so fond of the beans.

Mr. G. P. Walton of the U. S. Department of Agriculture says, "After a favorable season the quantities of mesquite beans available over large areas of southwestern United States are limited only by the facilities for gathering the ripe fruit. Wilson states that in southern New Mexico it is not uncommon to see a medium-sized bush, with a spread of not more than fourteen to eighteen feet, bearing from one to one and one-half bushels of beans. Although the process of gathering the fruit is tedious, during the 1917 season the beans could be secured for from twenty to thirty cents per one hundred pounds. A native worker at the New Mexico Agricultural Experiment Station gathered about one hundred and seventy-five pounds of dried beans in a day. Since the pods weigh but twenty-one pounds to the bushel however, the man gathered only eight and one-third bushels, not a very strenuous day's work. In a northwestern province of India, a good tree may yield more than two hundred pounds of ripe fruit a year."