fertilize the
plat. The wage paid in palay is equivalent to 5 cents per laborer,
or 50 cents. Five women can transplant the rice in one day; cost,
25 cents. Cultivating and protecting the crop falls to the members
of the family which owns the sementera, so the Igorot say; he claims
never to have to pay for such labor. Twenty people can harvest the
crop in a day; cost, 1 peso.

The total annual expense of maintaining the sementera as a productive
property is, therefore, equivalent to 1.75 pesos. This leaves 8.25
pesos net profit when the annual expense is deducted from the annual
gross profit. A net profit of 8.25 per cent is about equivalent to
the profit made on the 10,000-acre Bonanza grain farms in the valley
of the Red River of the North, and the 5,000-acre corn farm of Iowa.

Zooculture

The carabao, hog, chicken, and dog are the only animals domesticated
by the Igorot of the Bontoc culture area.

Cattle are kept by Benguet Igorot throughout the extent of the
province. Some towns, as Kabayan, have 300 or 400 head, but the Bontoc
Igorot has not yet become a cattle raiser.

In Benguet, Lepanto, and Abra there are pueblos with half a hundred
brood mares. Daklan, of Benguet, has such a bunch, and other pueblos
have smaller herds.

In Bontoc Province between Bontoc pueblo and Lepanto Province a few
mares have recently been brought in. Sagada and Titipan each have
half a dozen. Near the east side of the Bontoc area there are a few
bunches of horses reported among the Igorot, and in February, 1903, an
American brought sixteen head from there into Bontoc. These horses are
all descendants of previous domestic animals, and an addition of half
a hundred is said to have been made to the number by horses abandoned
by the insurgents about three years past. Some of the sixteen brought
out in 1903 bore saddle marks and the brands common in the coastwise
lands. These eastern horses are not used by the Igorot except for food,
and no property right is recognized in them, though the Igorot brands
them with a battle-ax brand. He exercises about as much protecting
control over them as the Bontoc man does over the wild carabao.

Carabao

The people of Bontoc say that when Lumawig came to Bontoc they had
no domestic carabaos -- that those they now have were originally
purchased, before the Spaniards came, from the Tinguian of Abra
Province.

There are in the neighborhood of 400 domestic carabaos owned in Bontoc
and Samok