THE KEAWE 41
Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station reported,'* "The feeding test made by this Station showed that the seeds thus cracked are completely digested by horses, mules, and cattle.
"The keeping quality of the meal is quite sufficient for the ordinary demands of the trade. When kept in sacks or open containers, it retains its original odor and flavor, without change, for six or eight months; and the meal is no more subject to the attacks of insects than is any other grain feed."
E. V. Wilcox said (letter. August 12, 1913), "The algaroba beans have been formerly shipped to Japan as a food for cavalry horses, but the product is now all used in Honolulu. It has been adopted as a part of the rations for army horses of this Territory."
The evidence in the passages quoted above is truly astonishing when compared with that of the standard crops of the American field. In considering these facts one should remember the necessary restraints and conservatism of statement which must and do mark the official representatives of the Departground in a swing-hammer sand machine, a machine made to crush soft sandstone.
In 1912 Mr. Ben Williams, ranch manager on the above-mentioned estate on the Island of Maui, told me that he was having one thousand to one thousand four hundred tons of beans per year picked up. Women picked up eight or ten forty-pound sacks of beans a day and received an average of one dollar for the day's work. Many women picked up twenty sacks daily, thus making two dollars to two dollars and twenty-five cents a day, which was more than they made in the sugar fields. It cost Mr. Williams twelve dollars and fifty cents per ton to have the beans picked up and put in the storehouse, five dollars to take them from the storehouse, have them ground and bagged, the bags cost two dollars; total cost was nineteen dollars and fifty cents. Allowing ten per cent, for shrinkage, the meal cost a little over one cent per pound.
Six men ground ten tons per day with electrically driven machinery and one-quarter of a barrel of oil. The total cost was three dollars per ton; itemized as follows:
Coste Labor: 26 iiss asic Sensi ees Sessa Gee Sees $12.00 BOWES" sovciswiecoisseiseisiwaiweaiseuieupinivieisinveiseeie 12.00 Capital charge .....ccscccccccsccsscccccccccccecs 6.00
It could be done for less if the plant were worked more continuously. 18 Press Bulletin No. 26. The Algaroba.
