Page:Provincial geographies of India (Volume 1).djvu/164

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144
AGRICULTURE AND CROPS
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and then let the land lie fallow for a year. Unless a good deal of manure is available this is the course to follow, even in the case of irrigated land. Some poor hard soils are only fit for crops of coarse rice sown after the embanked fields have been filled in the monsoon by drainage from surrounding waste. Other lands are cropped only in the autumn because the winter rainfall is very scanty. Flooded lands are often sown only for the spring harvest.

Fig. 49. A drove of goats — Lahore.

Cattle, Sheep, and Goats.— In 1909 there were in the British districts of the Panjab 4 J million bullocks and 625,000 male buffaloes available to draw 2,169,000 ploughs and 288,000 carts, thresh the corn, and work a quarter of a million wells, besides sugar, oil, and flour mills. The cattle of the hills, N.W. Panjab, and riverain tracts are undersized, but in the uplands of the Central Panjab and S.E. districts fine oxen are used. The horned cattle share 18 millions of pasture land, much