The 25,000 loans made through the Fund covered livestock, seeds and fertilizer, building materials, insecticides and spraying equipment, land development and other purposes. Over 95 percent of the loan applications are approved, and the repayment rate has remained very high. Creating new land for farming has been an important part of Kadoorie efforts. Horace came upon a group of squatters who had been moved from the city to make room for a new road; he found them moping about forlornly on a rocky field which was the site of a cemetery from which the bodies had been removed. Horace suggested that they use the rocks to build pigsties, promising them the needed cement and two pigs for each sty. On his next visit he found many pigsties completed, but was temporarily baffled when the settlers asked him to buy for them a nearby hillside rock, fully 100 yards wide and stretching from the bottom of the hill to the top. He acquired the rock, and the settlers, working from the bottom upwards, covered it with terraced growing lands. At Nim Shue Wan village, a hillside settlement along a steep shore, the Kadoorie Association built a seawall, mixed the sticky red earth of the hillside with beach sand, and produced a good soil for vegetable-growing which now supports 100 families in the area. At Pak Ngau Shek, the Kadoorie farm on the high slopes of Tai Mo Shan, highest (3,140 feet) mountain in the colony, the brothers began to experiment with plants and animals, chiefly because the land had been judged worthless for farmers. If they could make anything thrive there, they believed, it might teach them some way to utilize the colony’s heavy proportion of wasteland. They had many failures, such as typhoons uprooting all their shallow-rooted peach trees, but they discovered that even trees and vegetables considered unsuitable for high lands did very well. Some vegetables, growing more slowly on the mountainsides, reached the market when lowland crops were less plentiful, and therefore brought better prices. The farm operated at a financial loss, but gave full value as an agricultural testing site. The Kadoorie Agricultural Aid Association meets once every two weeks, considers 50 to 100 applications for help, and tries to assist about 15 new families every day. It has given away 7,000 pigs in less than three months. Many situations won’t wait for committee meetings; some farmers in dire straits have walked up to Boulder Lodge, Horace’s home at Castle Peak, to ask for help in the middle of the night. Horace, who often works a 13-hour day and spends Sundays roaming around the farm districts, is more flattered than annoyed by these occasional late-hour callers. “Speed is of the essence in this work,” he said. “When a typhoon heads this way, we assemble building materials for repair work and all the quick-growing seeds we can buy; then we’re ready to help the farm people get back into operation and plant vegetables as soon as the flooding subsides.”