Gold, Sport, and Coffee Planting in Mysore: With chapters on coffee planting in Coorg, the Mysore representative assembly, the Indian congress, caste and the Indian silver question, being the 38 years' experiences of a Mysore planterElliot, Robert H. (Robert Henry)
History
Gold, Sport, and Coffee Planting in Mysore: With chapters on coffee planting in Coorg, the Mysore representative assembly, the Indian congress, caste and the Indian silver question, being the 38 years' experiences of a Mysore planter
Elliot, Robert H. (Robert Henry)
Caste -- India; Coffee; Karnataka (India) -- Description and travel; Karnataka (India) -- Politics and government
When, as in former times in Coorg, the planters used no shade, many good
arguments existed in favour of making very large reserves of forest land
in order to prevent denudation, and its injurious effects on climate, and
on the water supply of the rivers and the country generally. But when you
merely replace the underwood of the forest with an underwood of coffee
which completely covers the ground, and again shield this from drying
winds and the burning sun by a complete covering of trees, either those of
the original forest or others planted to take their place, the case is
entirely altered, and from the coffee land thus shaded there is no more
loss of water and soil (perhaps not so much loss of water, as great pains
are taken to avert wash) than there was in the original forest, and the
climatic and conservative effects of forests are therefore entirely
undisturbed. Wherever, then, lands exist which are suitable for coffee
planting under shade, they should certainly, in the interests of the
country generally, and especially of the rapidly increasing population, be
taken up for coffee, and the State forests be confined to those tracts
which, from over heavy rainfall, or other causes, are unsuitable for
coffee planting.
Other products, and especially cinchona, have received a fair amount of
attention in Coorg, and the land on the Ghauts to the westward, where, as
we have seen, the coffee plantations have been abandoned, proved to be
well suited for the production of the commoner kinds of bark, and large
extents of abandoned or semi-abandoned lands were planted with cinchonas.
But when the prices of bark fell (whoever takes to growing a drug will
soon realize the meaning of the phrase "a drug in the market"), the
cultivation was no longer worthy of attention, and has practically died
out. Ceara rubber also met with the same fate.
I may here mention that Messrs. Matheson and Co., who held no less than
7,000 out of the 20,000 acres occupied by Europeans in the Bamboo
district, went to great expense in introducing coffee seed from Brazil,
Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Jamaica, with the view of ascertaining whether
coffee grown from the seed thus imported would be less susceptible to
attacks of leaf disease. But, though the plants raised from these seeds
are doing exceedingly well, it was found that they were also liable to be
attacked by leaf disease, often before they were even out of the nursery,
and in this respect proved to be neither better nor worse than the Coorg
variety of coffee. A clearing of fifty acres has been entirely planted
with coffee raised from Blue Mountain seed, but there is nothing in the
appearance of the trees to show that they are not indigenous to the
country.
Liberian coffee has been tried experimentally in several parts of Coorg,
but I cannot learn that any results have been obtained which would tend
to encourage its adoption as a substitute for the variety at present
grown.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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