{"book":"adl0981","page":50,"text":"In Badakhshan, 30 acres of land were sown with pistachio seeds and 13,805 Japanese mulberry seeds were planted in an attempt to foster sericulture. At Balkhab and Sar-i-Pul 5,500 poplars have been planted and two seres of almonds, apricots and pines sown.\n\nSericulture\nSericulture has been practised in various localities of Afghanistan for centuries. More recently, however, it has received the attention of those Govern-ment departments concerned with the increase in production of silk and the raising of the nation's standard of living.\n\nExperimental areas have been set aside in many provinces where silkworms are bred under the supervision of experts both Afghan and foreign, the services of the latter having been facilitated by the United Nations Technical Assistance Pro-gramme. Results so far have been encouraging and the future prospects of Sericulture in Afghanistan appear to be very good.\n\nDuring the year a new station has been established in Herat. The Gulbagh station in Kabul was completed at about the same time, and this year arrangements were made for the breeding of silkworms. In these stations the egg-laying moths are hatched, and these in turn are distributed throughout the country.\n\nSome 885 boxes of silkworm eggs have been distributed in Badakhshan. In Nangarhar 800 boxes were sold during the year, while at Herat the sales rose to 1,784 cases. Seven boxes were given to the Helmand Valley Authority, 170 boxes to the Cotton Union Co. of Kunduz and 20 boxes to the Village Development Project Headquarters. One sample box was sent to France.\n\nThirty packages of the egg-laying moth were sent to the Baghlan Sugar Refinery for the second term of the year 1337 and\n\ntwelve packages to the Kunduz Cotton Union Company for the first term of that year.\n\nAt the Nangarhar station 182 packages of the egg-laying moth have been produced from 2,000 boxes of eggs.\n\nParwan produced 1,000 boxes of eggs, the Tapa-i-Taj Beg station between 4,000 and 5,000 boxes, together with 330 packages of egg-laying moths.\n\nThe cocoons gathered from all the stations amounted to 40 seres (640 lbs.). It has been decided to establish another station in Nangarhar, where 15 acres of land have been set aside for the cultiva-tion of Japanese mulberry trees. For the time being the grant for this purpose has been fixed at 280,000 Afghanis.\n\nIrrigation and Canal Improvements\nThe Ajimir Canal, the Kelagai Desert and the Kokcha River have all been surveyed.\n\nGrafting olive trees in Pactya Province\n\n47","chars":2506,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0981/00050.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":109,"title":"Afghan progress in the third year of the plan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0981/50","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0981/canvas/50","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0981/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0981_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."}}