{"book":"adl0957","page":68,"text":"47\n\nworld. It requires much labour, and the threshed grain is often very dirty. It is more wasteful of grain than in modern methods of harvesting by machinery.\n\nGrapes are grown in a unique way, unknown in the other parts of the world. The vines are planted in trenches and trained upon high earthen ridges. This system, which is almost universal here, has both advantages and disadvantages. The ridges, once they are built, support the vine and protect the fruit from wind and excessive sunshine, and the trenches make irrigation easy. The fruit is sometimes damaged, however, if the ridges become wet through rain during the ripening period, although rain at this season is very rare here. Another disadvantage is that this system is waste of land, that is, fewer vines can be planted on each jareeb of land and, therefore, yields are less than when vines are planted by other systems. Still another disadvantage is the enormous amount of hand labour required in excavating the trenches and building the ridges.\n\nCultivation, as it is commonly practised in Western countries, is almost unknown in Afghanistan. The only crops grown in rows are some of the vegetables and melons which are grown on raised beds or ridges. Carrots are commonly grown in this way. Wheat, corn and most vegetable seeds are broadcast on flat ground. Weeds are pulled by hand or cut off with the sickle. Hard crusting of the surface soil after irrigation is a common trouble under this system, and this commonly prevents seedlings from emerging from the soil. It also causes a dense, hard condition of the soil that is unfavourable for the growth of many crop plants. The hard crusting and dense condition can be prevented to a considerable extent by mulching or heavy manuring.","chars":1755,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00068.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/68","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/68","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."}}