Page:Provincial geographies of India (Volume 1).djvu/168

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148
AGRICULTURE AND CROPS
[ch.

full details about classes of cultivation and crops in all the zones Tables II, III and IV should be consulted.

North Central Panjab Plain.— The best soils and the finest tillage are to be found in the North Central Zone. Gujrat has been included in it, though it has also affinities in the north with the North-West area, and in the south with the South- Western plain. The rainfall varies from 25 to 35 inches. One-third of the cultivated area is protected by wells, and the well cultivation is of a very high class in Ludhiana and Jalandhar, where heavily manured maize is followed by a fine crop of wheat, and cane is commonly grown. In parts of Sialkot and Gujrat the well cultivation is of a different type, the area served per well being large and the object being to protect a big acreage of wheat in the spring harvest. The chief crops in this zone are wheat and chart. The latter is included under "Other Fodder" in Tables III and IV.

North-Western Area.- The plateau north of the Salt Range has a very clean light white sandy loam soil requiring little ploughing and no weeding. It is often very shallow, and this is one reason for the great preference for cold weather crops. Kharif crops are more liable to be burned up. Generally speaking the rainfall is from 15 to 25 inches, the proportion falling in the winter and spring being larger than elsewhere. There is, except in Peshawar and Bannu, where the conditions involve a considerable divergence from the type of this zone, practically no canal irrigation. The well irrigation is unimportant and in most parts consists of a few acres round each well intensively cultivated with market-gardening crops. The dry crops are generally very precarious. In Mianwali the Indus valley is a fine tract, but the harvests fluctuate greatly with the extent of the floods. The Thai in Mianwali to the south of the Sind Sagar railway is really a part of the next zone.