Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/190

 rich milk, after which the ewe was pushed aside to join the growing mass of the recently milked. That evening at the house of Joao Dias, estate foreman, I was offered rich cheese of sheep's milk, but my previously good appetite for it was diminished by my memory of the milking in the lane.

The bark of the evergreen-oak (quercus ilex) is of no value, but the tree yields more acorns than the cork oak. No Portuguese will cut down the one tree to make room for the other, so absolutely alike does he value the trees. Often the two species are mixed indiscriminately in the same tract, but in some localities the ilex forests are almost pure stand and are cared for exactly as are the cork forests. At Evora in south central Portugal—a locality famed for its pork production—Mr. Estevao Oliveira Fernandes, a graduate of a German engineering school, told me that the local estimate of production for a ten-year period was as follows: for a cork forest 34 kilos of pork per hectare (30 pounds per acre) and for an ilex forest, 68 kilos per hectare (60 pounds per acre). Compare these with pasture yields (on page 268) and then consider the low rainfall and dry summer of Portugal, and its age-long exposure to a robber agriculture, and the oak tree stands forth as a crop plant most worthy of consideration.

In some sections of Spain and Portugal the young ilex trees are allowed to grow where they have by chance sprung up in the fields. Around and under the trees the machineless cultivation of wheat and beans, barley and hay, goes on just the same. This combination of trees and crops gives a beautiful parklike landscape. The cultivation helps the oaks to make acorns, and after the grain and other crops are harvested, the hogs are turned in to gather the mast crop.

On the slopes of the Sierra Nevada in Spain, a few miles south of Granada, I saw the ilex rendering its supreme serv-