The United States Consul Dawson at Valencia got a Spanish figure of one thousand one hundred and eighty pounds per acre as the average annual production.
As the result of a conference between a leading dealer and the local agronomist official in the town of Faro in South Portugal, I was told that the ordinary carob tree would yield one hundred to one hundred and thirty pounds; a very good tree three hundred to four hundred pounds; and an unusual tree sixteen hundred to eighteen hundred pounds. They further said that ordinary land with carob would bear on the average about forty-four hundred pounds per acre, and that a good stand of carob trees raised the value of rocky ground from three hundred to seven hundred dollars per hectare (2.47 acres).
In this locality the carobs were very common. They were almost always in sight and almost invariably standing at random where a tree had sprung up by chance and then had been grafted. Personally I prefer to cut this figure of average yield in two.
Mr. Louisides of Larnaca, Cyprus, says, "We very often see large trees yielding nine to ten hundred weights," and he claims that there are farms in Cyprus that make more than one hundred hundred weights per acre per year on the average. This gentleman, who was a leading steamship agent of Larnaca and an esteemed correspondent of the American Consul at Beirut, reiterated this and other strong statements after I had expressed some doubt about the statements being accurate.[1]
- ↑ Letter from P. J. Louisides, Larnaca, Cyprus, August 29, 1913:
"As the carob tree in Cyprus is self-planted, it is rather difficult to estimate the exact yield per acre.
"Generally there are fifty to sixty trees in an acre of land at the age of
produce as much as eight hundred or nine hundred pounds." (The Scientific American, January 11, 1913.)
A circular on cultural directions for the carob issued by the U. S. Department of Agriculture, January 21, 1908, speaks of trees that may reach sixty feet height, seventy-five foot spread, and a yield of three thousand pounds of beans.
