102 EXPERIMENT STATION RECORD. [Vol.38 



wheat and hogs, the outlme summarizes the aims for securing suffi- 

 cient cereals of various kinds, meat and dairy products, sugar, cotton, 

 and other products for the Nation, its armies, and its Allies. It -will 

 furnish the basis for personal appeal and guidance throughout the 

 country, but it differs radically from the programs of some of the 

 European countries in its lack of provision for enforcement or regu- 

 lation of the industry, such as is now common there. For agriculture 

 in the war has assumed the character of a military necessity in those 

 countries, and although not brought directly under military control, 

 it is dominated to a large degree by its requirements and subjected 

 to civil orders and regulations hardly less mandatory. 



The increasing extent to which these measures have been put into 

 effect in Europe, especially in the past year, shows by comparison 

 the relative freedom which prevails here, and the absence of many 

 of the real handicaps and hardships which have to be met in other 

 countries. Here dependence is placed on individual response and the 

 determination to resist failure, while there regulation and compul- 

 sion have been resorted to in a thousand ways new to modern times, 

 and stimulation and direct aid have become the order of the day. A 

 knowledge of the conditions and measures relating to agriculture in 

 the war is of no small interest in this country, since food production 

 has become one of the great cooperative enterprises between us and 

 our Allies. 



The efforts made in respect to European agriculture are well illus- 

 trated in Great Britain, since that country has been peculiarly de- 

 pendent on outside food supplies.. This has amounted in the past to 

 four-fifths of its consumption of wheat and two-thirds of its food- 

 stuffs as a whole. It has resulted in increasing the cost of the war, 

 complicated the problem of foreign exchange, and made heavy de- 

 mands on the tonnage of the merchant marine when its services were 

 greatly needed otherwise. 



This dependence on outside supplies was due in part to the amount 

 of land in permanent grass, which under prevailing conditions was 

 steadily increasing. As Mr. A. D. Hall has pointed out, during the 

 forty years from 1872 to 1913 three and one-half million acres in 

 England and Wales passed from cultivation into grass land, and the 

 number of men employed in agriculture steadily declined with the 

 area of plowed land. 



Ordinarily the farmers of England and Wales plow about eight 

 million acres a year. The area of temporary and permanent grass 

 in the country amounts to 18,500,000 acres. Dr. E. J. Russell, director 

 of the Eothamsted Station, has given some interesting illustrations 

 of what this means to food production. For example, land in po- 

 tatoes produces nearly forty times as much food as medium grass 



