{"book":"adl0957","page":57,"text":"38\n\nFlora and Fauna\n\nVegetation and Food-products.—The uncertainty and\nscantiness of rainfall, the average of which is not more than\n15 inches a year, mostly received in winter and early spring,\nplay an important part in the agricultural life and economic\ndevelopment of the country. A good rainfall naturally affects\nnot only the amount of dry cultivation, called the Lalmi, which\ndepends entirely on spring rains, but it also affects the irrigated\ncrop, called Abi, and the spring-streams and Karezes (sub\nterranian channels).\n\nIn the greater part of the country there are two harvests;\nthe one reaped in summer, called Bahari or the spring-crop, is\nthe result of autumn sowing, and includes wheat, barley, and\ncertain varieties of peas and beans. The second harvest, called\nTirmahi or Autumnal, is gathered in autumn from a spring\nsowing, and includes crops of rice, Indian corn, varieties of\nmillet, mash (phascolous mungo), tobacco, turnips, and maize,\nbesides other grains of less importance. The loftier regions,\nsuch as Hazarajat, Kabul, Asmar and Badakhshan, yield but\none harvest.\n\nIn addition to these cereals, crops of madder, cotton,\nclover, hemp and lucerne, are very largely cultivated, clover,\ntrefoil and lucerne from important fodder crops, and when\nproperly irrigated, are said to afford ten to twelve cuttings in\nthe season. They are given green to the cattle during summer,\nand a large quantity is dried and made into wisps to be used\nin winter. Green lucerne is given to horses, mules and cattle,\nsometimes alone, and sometimes chopped and mixed with chaff.\nGreat care is necessary in judging the proper quantity of green\nlucerne to be given to cloven-footed animals, as they relish it\nso much that they often over-eat and burst, unless promptly","chars":1767,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00057.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/57","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/57","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}