The agricultural and forest products of British West AfricaDudgeon, Gerald C. (Gerald Cecil)
History
The agricultural and forest products of British West Africa
Dudgeon, Gerald C. (Gerald Cecil)
Agriculture -- Africa, West; Forest products -- Africa, West
The cultivation of groundnuts for local consumption is carried on,
but the ridge system of planting, which is in vogue in the Gambia,
is not adopted in Sierra Leone, and the groundnut stalks are
removed from the ground without the nuts attached to them. The
nuts in Sierra Leone are permitted to remain in the ground and
depreciate in quality through insufficient drying. The success of
groundnut cultivation depends largely upon the plant being grown
on a loose bed of friable soil, and, where such conditions exist,
the Gambian method should prove satisfactory.
Experiments show that the nuts should be decorticated before
sowing. The usual local method of sowing is to scatter the nuts upon
the unbroken ground and then cover with loose earth. Some damage is
done by rats, bushpig and termites, and in 1914 a fungoid disease
(_Cercospora personata_) appeared in Karene. The Agricultural
Department has obtained 12 cwts. to the acre in its trials.
The variety of nut grown is apparently identical with that of the
Gambia, from which country the seed has probably been obtained in
the past.
=COCOA.=—Some years ago cocoa was introduced into the Colony, but,
although some of the Colonial planters had received their training in
the cocoa estates of Fernando Po and San Thomé, no success attended
their efforts in Sierra Leone. The heavy rainfall, combined with
the long period of drought peculiar to the country, is detrimental
to the industry. More recently experiments have been conducted in
the Protectorate, where a lighter rainfall occurs; but here also
the conditions are not generally favourable, as the long period of
dry weather is not compensated for by humidity in the atmosphere.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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