AGRICULTURE AND IRRIGATION.
In several directions methods of cultivation in Vizagapatam differ from those in the south. Rice-fields (especially in Pálkonda, where the Nágávali silt is very rich) are often left unmanured for years together, but the seedlings are given a good start by plentiful supplies of fertilizers to the seed-beds. Where manures are used, the wild indigo and sunn hemp plants are frequently ploughed in when green. Dry land, on the other hand, which in the south is often neglected, is here usually plentifully manured, especially with tank silt, and ragi and cambu (and sometimes cholam) instead of being sown are transplanted in dry fields from seed-beds after rain, the seedlings being put out by hand in a furrow and their roots covered over by ploughing another furrow alongside. Instead, again, of being threshed directly they are harvested, as in the south, the crops are often stacked on the fields for months until the ryot has nothing more emergent to do. Except in Pálkonda, double crops of paddy are rare, the wet-fields being either utilized, after the paddy has been removed, for growing gingelly, green gram, or a multiplicity of garden crops and vegetables, usually with the help of wells; or being sown with ragi during the south-west monsoon and then with paddy with the north-east rains later on. The paddy is of very numerous varieties, differing from taluk to taluk, and it is not possible to point to any one kind as being universally the most popular. Vizagapatam rice has a high character and it is said that at one time rice used regularly to be sent from Gódávari to Anakápalle to be exported again as Vizagapatam rice.
On the hills the paddy is practically all of it rain-fed, but on the 3,000 feet plateau some is raised in the beds of nullahs and irrigated with their water. Gunupur, Jeypore and Naurangpur taluks (see the accounts of these in Chapter XV) are the three tracts where most is raised. Gunupur rice is favourably known as far afield as Calcutta. The crops grown in poducultivation (see p. Ill) are usually dry grains like sámai, hill cholam and the like. The greater part of the seed is thrown on the higher part of the patch and left to be washed down to the lower portions by the rains. The careful terracing of the hills carried out by the Savaras in Gunupur is alluded to on p. 257.
In 1904 an Agricultural Association was formed at Vizagapatam. It has held two most successful cattle shows and has opened an experimental farm on 21 acres of land near Vizianagram granted by the Rája's adoptive sister. The District Board will very shortly open a veterinary hospital at Vizagapatam.
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