42 FACTS ABOUT CROP TREES
ment of Agriculture. Even more astonishing evidence was given me by Mr. Ben Williams, a Welshman, fifty-five years of age, ranch manager of the Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Company's estate on the Island of Maui. _ _ This estate has fifteen thousand acres in cane land, twentyone thousand three hundred acres classed as waste and pasture, of which none is real waste and none real pasture. The area involved, thirty-six thousand three hundred acres— nearly sixty square miles—is as large as some of the smaller counties in the United States. Its population is in thousands, and its organization is a vast group of industries, well subdivided, with a superintendent of cane fields, a factory superintendent, a chief engineer in the sugar mill, a foreman of machine shop, and the ranch manager. Mr. Williams, in charge of two hundred dairy cows, eight hundred cattle, seven hundred horses and mules, and two hundred and fifty pigs.
Of Mr. Williams' ranch domain eight to nine thousand acres are in algaroba, planted by the cattle as they scattered the beans from one tree that stood by the windmill and its attendant drinking trough. By rule of thumb observation Mr. Williams said that one hundred pounds of keawe meal, when fed to pigs, horses, and cattle, were about equivalent to eighty pounds of good barley, which had long been the standard horse feed of the islands. Mr. Williams said that each acre of good keawe will fatten at least six head of cattle. If the animals weigh six hundred pounds when turned in, in ninety days they will weigh over eight hundred pounds. I expressed my doubts. "I have seen it done," declared Mr. Williams. "I know this, that you can take cattle, lean ones, that do weigh five hundred pounds and should weigh seven hundred pounds; and if you put six of them on an acre of good keawe, they will average better than two pounds a day on raw beans which they pick up for themselves. You can take the season from the middle of July, and the six cattle will gain twelve hundred pounds and sometimes will go to
