Every Day Life on a Ceylon Cocoa Estate by Mary E. Steuart

We are, at present, suffering from a perfect plague of common black house flies. They cover everything eatable, and, in common with a much smaller variety, are perpetually flying into one's eyes. This nuisance is in part caused by the cleaning out of a large cattle-shed just below the bungalow, and the flies will, I am told, disappear when the monsoon really bursts. I sincerely hope so.

The Ceylon cattle-sheds are built in such a curious fashion, that I must describe one. In the first place it must he borne in mind that the stock on a Cocoa Estate, with the exception of the working bullocks, is kept to provide manure for the enrichment of the crops, therefore everything is arranged to facilitate the handling of that product. The shed here is a long building with an iron roof, built so to speak, in three terraces, each about eight feet higher than the other. In the top terrace there is room for thirty cattle to stand abreast in a long line, with a similar number ranged at their back, with their heads in an opposite direction. These cattle are stall fed with grass and poonac and are bedded down with a coarse kind of grass almost like straw. When fresh bedding is required, the old is thrown into the next terrace, which is occupied by a number of pigs; these have layers and layers of bedding thrown down for their use, till the surface becomes so much raised, and forms such a rich manure that it is thought time to remove it, and to place it in a stack outside the shed ready for use when required. Then da capo. The third terrace is used as a cart shed, though a small portion at one end is enclosed with a bamboo stockade and divided off into pig styes where the young litters of pigs are reared before they are old enough to be turned loose with the others. Nine coolies under a Kangany are told off to attend to the two cattle sheds, and to cut grass for their inmates; and each grass cutter is obliged to cut eighty bundles a day measuring two and a half feet each way.