When the Japanese were driven from the colony in 1945, they had reduced the livestock population to 4,611 cattle, 659 water buffalo, 8,740 pigs and 31,000 poultry. A count at the end of 1960 showed 18,000 cattle, 2,000 water buffalo, 184,000 pigs and 3,405,000 poultry. This tremendous increase stemmed directly from the expansion of the domestic market, but it was made possible by the colony government’s postwar plunge into marketing cooperatives for farm and sea products, the introduction of private and public loans for farmers and fishermen at reasonable interest rates, and the application of scientific methods to every phase of the farming and fishing industries. Agricultural production of every kind totaled $40,506,000 in 1960-61. In descending order of value, this included poultry (chiefly chickens), vegetables, pigs, rice, various animal products such as hides, hair and feathers, fresh milk, sweet potatoes and other field crops. Among other products of special interest are fruit (litchi, limes, tangerines, olives, etc.), pond fish (mullet and carp), export crops (water chestnuts, ginger, vegetable seeds, etc.) and such flowers as gladiolus, chrysanthemum, dahlia and carnation. That $40,506,000 farm-income figure has a momentarily impressive ring until one sees how it is divided. The average vegetable farm is about two-thirds of an acre, and the average “paddy,” or shallowly flooded unit of rice-growing land, usually runs to two acres, with an upward limit of five acres. There are several larger farms of 100 acres or more, but these are share-cropped by tenant farmers for exporters of special crops such as water chestnuts or ginger. The size of almost all other farms is dictated by the amount of hand labor one farm-owning family can perform; the only extra-human labor comes from the plow-pulling power of the dwarfish Brown Cattle and water buffalo. On these postage-stamp farms, tractors would be prohibitively expensive and as destructive as an army tank. Even a hand-operated power cultivator would be far too costly for a typical family farm. By Western standards, any farm of less than two acres would barely qualify as a truck garden, but the Chinese of the New Territories cultivate the land with unique intensiveness. A fresh-water paddy produces at least two rice crops and often an additional “catch crop” of vegetables each year; six to eight crops are harvested annually on all-vegetable farms. Farm income is as subdivided as the land. There are an estimated 30,000 farm families and a total of 250,000 persons who rely on farming for their living. The per capita income of the farming population therefore runs around $162 a year, or $13.50 a month, less the forty to sixty percent of crop value they must share with the landowner, leaving a meager net income of as little as $81 a year, or $6.75 a month. Things have been worse; in 1955 the annual per capita net income of farm people was about $30.