{"book":"adl0957","page":67,"text":"46\n\n(maize). In other places, corn, which is the second most important crop in most parts of the country, is grown largely on land that has produced only grass for a number of years.\n\nPasture for livestock is seldom purposely grown, but usually consists of natural vegetation, wheat-stubble, or other crop residues. In certain places, where moisture conditions are usually good and grasses invade the land, a good pasture may exist, but often the forage is coarse and unpalatable, and not capable of feeding large numbers of livestock. Improved irrigated pastures, consisting of selected plants, such as clover and good pasture grasses may help in feeding livestock, which are generally underfed. Fertilization is practised to some extent but much less than it could be to good advantage. Animal manure, night-soil and ashes are the fertilizers generally used. Chemical fertilizers are not yet popular, although they would increase crop yields on many soils. Manure (cow-dung) is commonly made into cakes and burned for fuel, and this destroys much of its fertilising value, even if the ashes are applied to the land.\n\nFarming is done largely by hand. The wooden plow, drawn by oxen, is the only common piece of farm equipment not worked by hand. Common tools are irrigation shovels, and hand-sickles. Small plots and tough sods are commonly spaded, whereas fields are generally plowed. Wheat is harvested with the sickle and collected in circular piles. The grain is trodded out by yoked cattle which are driven round and round on the piles. The grain is then separated from the chaff by winnowing—tossing the tramped mixture into the air and allowing the wind to blow away the chaff. This very slow and laborious system of harvesting and threshing is nearly the same that was in vogue some 2,000 years before in this part of the","chars":1830,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00067.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/67","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/67","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."}}