Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/81

 in North Carolina; 14.3 reported for South Carolina; and 12.3 reported for Georgia.

The above figures of yield, eight hundred and seventy-five pounds, should be compared with the eleven hundred and eighty pounds per year reported by Mr. Dawson for the Spanish crop.

I wish to emphasize the great value of this French testimony as to accuracy and also as to its significance as an example of the two-story type of agriculture. The plantation was run by an intelligent Frenchman assisted by his educated grown son. Their plantation of grapes, interspersed with carob trees at a distance of fifty feet, was as regular as a geometric diagram and as clean as a Chinese garden. The grapes were sprayed by American machinery. I asked about the yields of the carob. The men took me into a neat stone building. Near the door stood a good platform scale suitable for weighing sacks or packages. We went to the office in one corner and there they showed me books in which were recorded tables of yields for a dozen years. A druggist could not have seemed more exact.

They emphasized the fact that barley grew well right under the carob trees and said that the yield of grapes was absolutely the same as that of similar lands alongside which did not have carob trees. The appearance of the grapevines gave support to the claim. The effects of the open top of the carob trees and the blazing Algerian sun need to be considered. Fifteen hectares of newly planted carob demonstrated the satisfaction of these French farmers with the twenty years experiment.

They told me that work mules doing full labor did well on the straw of oats and all the carob beans they would eat.