ENG-1957 — Page 128

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HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT

next largest crop is vegetables, some production figures of which are given below, under Marketing. The production of vegetables has increased by 4,663.2 metric tons. Sweet potatoes are the most important winter crop, and small quantities of sugar-cane, ground-nuts and millet are also grown in season. There is a certain amount of fruit-growing, the principal fruit trees being listed in Chapter 23.

As a result of restrictions on the import into the United States of all products from China, New Territories farmers have developed a few export crops, such as water-chestnuts and prepared vegetable and fruit products; but the increasing local demand for home-grown food limits the area that can be brought under export crops. This new development has, however, brought ready cash in certain zones, and broadened the economy of subsistence farming.

Ploughs, harrows, and hand-tools are of local origin and give good service. There is nothing to be gained by adopting costly western tractors and implements.

Where possible, two crops of rice are grown on irrigated land. The yield ranges from 30 times the seed on the best land to 4 times on thin hill soils. In places with access to towns vegetables are often grown on a portion of the fallow, following the second rice crop. In other areas, after the second crop, the land is spelled by adopting a form of land rotation for the area under catch-crops. The greater use of fallow land for catch-cropping depends on water supply and maintaining the soil's fertility by artificial means. Chemical fertilizers are used when they can be afforded, but on the whole reliance is placed on traditional fertilizers such as nightsoil, bone meal, ashes, duck feathers, meal cakes and dried pulverized animal manure. Vegetable farmers (many of them immigrants who do not own paddy land) usually cultivate very small areas, seldom more than one acre, and depend entirely on fertilizers in order to make intensive use of their plots.