Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/82



After having traveled through the carob districts of Spain, Portugal, and Algeria, I wonder that many of the trees can yield at all, so shocking is the treatment to which the soil has been subjected for centuries. The trees almost invariably were scattered at random on rough land that was pastured. Pasturage is a steady removal of fertility. In most cases the good soil has been removed by the erosion of tillage, by hoof beats, and by the pattering of rain drops. Often little but a rocky framework remains. The bean crop is also usually carried away from the trees—another removal of fertility.

Certainly the soil of an average Mediterranean carob plantation has been treated worse than the test plats of Rothamstead Experiment Station, England, which have been continuously in wheat for generations in order to test the fundamental and enduring fertility of the soil, which in that case proved to be about enough to yield eight bushels of wheat per acre, a quarter of the average English yield.

After these many centuries of Old World experience the carob has joined the procession of Mediterranean crops emigrating to that section of the United States (California) having the Mediterranean climate. California suddenly discovers that it has carob trees, much carob land, and the possibility of an industry.

In hustling California this millennial crop tree is still in the introductory stage, but it has received the scrutiny of the inventive Yankee mind, and discoveries which may help to revolutionize the industry have already been made and put to work.

One of these discoveries applies to the growth of the trees, and others to the use of the beans. For years I have been