Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/78

 the carob furnishes twenty per cent, of the exports. The export next in importance is animals, which are in part the product of carob food.

How much do carob trees yield? It is very difficult to get reliable figures of yield of crops. This is true even for apples in the United States. Since most Mediterranean carobs are grown helter-skelter in chance and irregular locations, most figures are estimates and in making estimates it is easy to let the influence of the phenomenal tree run away with the lead pencil.

and in cultivated plantations 24 trees are set out to the hectare (2.47 acres). At the current market price of the fruit—76 cents a bushel (60 lbs.)—the crop would return $33.44 gross per hectare. Cultivation is estimated to cost $14.00 per hectare, leaving a net income of $19.44 to which may be added $2.20 for the prunings (which are sold as fire wood). This gives a profit of 8.65 per cent, on an estimated investment of $250 per hectare including the cost of the land, budded stock, cultivation, and compound interest on the actual outlay until the tree begins to bear profitable crops. In 1910, 271,000 acres in this consular district were reported to yield an average of 1,180 pounds of carobs per acre.

"In the vast irrigated plain of Valencia there exist a few important plantations which produce per tree far in excess of the no-pound average above stated. Individual trees frequently yield 600 to 900 pounds of carobs every year, and instances are known where crops of two and three times these figures were gathered from single trees. Cultivated plantations are quite profitable to the owners and amply demonstrate the possibilities of the carob tree under the most favorable conditions of care and cultivation.

"The carob is commonly used in conjunction with fresh and dry alfalfa as fodder for draft animals in heavy agricultural and industrial work and less extensively as forage for sheep, goats, cows, and hogs. It undergoes no process of manufacture or treatment whatever, being fed to the stock as gathered from the trees. Sometimes the meat of the finer varieties is ground and used with wheat flour in the daily diet of the poorer classes.

"Despite the economic value of the carob tree, its easy and inexpensive cultivation in soils often valueless for more remunerative crops, the regularity of yield, and the simplicity of the harvest, it is doubtless true that both acreage and production are declining. The reason is said to be the improved conditions in the orange and olive industries, the extensions of which are made at the expense of the carob."