GROUNDNUT CULTIVATION
Sta,—Your contributor, Mr. Cleland Scott, draws attention to the need to conserve the soil by allowing for fallows or rotation of crops in the area in Tanganyika to be brought under groundnut cultivation. The peasant cultivators of the Madras Deccan had to learn this lesson the hard way when the plant was introduced there as a cash crop more than thirty years ago. Fields in which groundnut was grown year after year rapidly lost their fertility, and the groundnut consequently for a time got a bad name. A phrase current in the Deccan was, "groundnut is the father's joy but the son's destruction "—a neat epitome for a state of affairs which, if left uncorrected, would have turned large tracts of country into a wilderness. Fortunately the native good sense of the farmers quickly prevailed. Groundnuts and millets were grown in alternate years, or a rotation of groundnuts, cotton and millets established.
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