ber to the end of December. They are reaped in March and April.
Roughly in the Panjab three-fifths of the crops belong to the spring
harvest. In the N.W.F. Province the proportion is somewhat higher. In
Kashmir the autumn crop is by far the more important.

[Illustration: Fig. 48. Persian Wheel Well and Ekka.]

~Implements of Husbandry and Wells.~--The implements of husbandry are
simple but effective in a land where as a rule there is no advantage in
stirring up the soil very deep. With his primitive plough (_hal_) and a
wooden clodcrusher (_sohaga_) the peasant can produce a tilth for a crop
like cane which it would be hard to match in England. There are two
kinds of wells, the _charsa_ or rope and bucket well and the _harat_ or
Persian wheel.

~Rotations.~--The commonest rotation in ordinary loam soils is to put in a
spring and autumn crop in succession and then let the land lie fallow
for a year. Unless a good deal of manure is available this is the course
to follow, even in the case of irrigated land. Some poor hard soils are
only fit for crops of coarse rice sown after the embanked fields have
been filled in the monsoon by drainage from surrounding waste. Other
lands are cropped only in the autumn because the winter rainfall is very
scanty. Flooded lands are often sown only for the spring harvest.

[Illustration: Fig. 49. A drove of goats--Lahore.]

~Cattle, Sheep, and Goats.~--In 1909 there were in the British districts
of the Panjab 4-1/4 million bullocks and 625,000 male buffaloes
available to draw 2,169,000 ploughs and 288,000 carts, thresh the corn,
and work a quarter of a million wells, besides sugar, oil, and flour
mills. The cattle of the hills, N.W. Panjab, and riverain tracts are
undersized, but in the uplands of the Central Panjab and S.E. districts
fine oxen are used. The horned cattle share 18 millions of pasture land,
much extremely poor, with 4 million sheep and 5-1/2 million goats.
Hence the enormous area devoted to fodder crops.

~Zones.~--Six zones can be distinguished, but, as no district is wholly
confined to the mountain zone, it must for statistical purposes be
united to the submontane zone:

(_a_) Mountain above 5000 feet Panjab--Kangra, Simla, Native
States in Hills, Ambala,
Hoshyarpur.

(_b_) Submontane N.W.F. Province. Hazara,
Kashmir