Interesting Agricultural
p. 21 · Read in the full issue
Experiment
AN interesting experiment is being carried out on Pamua Island, near San Cristoval, in the Solomons Group, by the Melanesian Mission. On that island, Mr. Herbert D. Freshwater is conducting an agricultural experimental farm with crops and plants obtained from the New Guinea Administration’s demonstration plantation at Keravat.
The Melanesian Mission is encouraging village headmen on every island in the group to send young men to Pamua to study new methods of agriculture which, in the Mandated Territory of New Guinea, have proved to the natives their superior ity over the old ways.
In writing of the scheme recently, the Bishop of Melanesia said that if the Solomon Islanders learned only of the value of the rotation of crops then the experiment would not have been in vain.
Crop rotation, he wrote, not only enables the natives to retain gardens at com paratively short distances from their vil lages instead of pushing further and further away into the bush, but at the same time provides natural manuring for the ground, which does much to improve native agriculture and enable the cul tivators to get full value from what is grown.