Both maize and gennara have broad green leaves, and long juicy succulent stalks.  They grow to a good height, and when cut up and mixed with chopped straw and carrots, form a most excellent feed for cattle.  Besides the bullocks, each factory keeps up a staff of generally excellent horses, for the use of the assistant or manager, on which he rides over his cultivation, and looks generally after the farm.  Some of the native subordinates also have ponies, or Cabool horses, or country-breds; and for the feed of these animals some few acres of oats are sown every cold season.  In most factories too, when any particular bit of the Zeraats gets exhausted by the constant repetition of indigo cropping, a rest is given it, by taking a crop of oil seeds or oats off the land.  The oil seeds usually sown are mustard or rape.  The oil is useful in the factory for oiling the screws or the machinery, and for other purposes.

The factory roads through the Zeraats are kept in most perfect order; many of them are metalled.  The ditches are cleaned once a year.  All thistles and weeds by the sides of the roads and ditches, are ruthlessly cut down.  The edges of all the fields are neatly trimmed and cut.  Useless trees and clumps of jungle are cut down; and in fact the Zeraats round a factory shew a perfect picture of orderly thrift, careful management, and neat, scientific, and elaborate farming.

Having got the Zeraats, the next thing is to extend the cultivation outside.

The land in India is not, as with us at home, parcelled out into large farms.  There are wealthy proprietors, rajahs, baboos, and so on, who hold vast tracts of land, either by grant, or purchase, or hereditary succession; but the tenants are literally the children of the soil.  Wherever a village nestles among its plantain or mango groves, the land is parcelled out among the villagers.  A large proprietor does not reckon up his farms as a landlord at home would do, but he counts his villages.  In a village with a thousand acres belonging to it, there might be 100 or even 200 tenants farming the land.  Each petty villager would have his acre or half acre, or four, or five, or ten, or twenty acres, as the case might be.  He holds this by a ‘tenant right,’ and cannot be dispossessed as long as he pays his rent regularly.  He can sell his tenant right, and the purchaser on paying the rent, becomes the bona fide possessor of the land to all intents and purposes.

If the average rent of the village lands was, let me say, one rupee eight annas an acre, the rent roll of the 1000 acres would be 1500 rupees.  Out of this the government land revenue comes.  Certain deductions have to be made—­some ryots may be defaulters.  The village temple, or the village Brahmin, may have to get something, the road-cess has to be paid, and so on.  Taking everything into account, you arrive at a pretty fair view of what the rental is.  If the proprietor of the village wants a loan of money, or if you offer to pay him the rent by half-yearly or quarterly instalments, you taking all the risk of collecting in turn from each ryot individually, he is often only too glad to accept your offer, and giving you a lease of the village for whatever term may be agreed on, you step in as virtually the landlord, and the ryots have to pay their rents to you.