280 Sir A. Daniel Hail [April 26, 



sistence. The animal has to live on readj-grown food and is a bad 

 converter ; the pig which is the best haloitually eats six or seven 

 pounds of' barley meal for every pound of pork he furnishes, and fat 

 cattle consume at least twenty pounds of essential food for each 

 pound of beef they lay on. Of course much of this food was such as 

 human beings do not eat, grass or roots, but some was always 

 potential human food, and the land which grew the cattle food might 

 have grown human food. And this brings us to the second point : 

 the absolute production from grass land is much below that from 

 arable land, perhaps only a third on the average if both are set to 

 produce meal or milk, less than a twentieth if the grass produces, as 

 it only can, animal products, while the arable is turning out human 

 food of a vegetable nature. Consider an acre of ordinary grass land ; 

 it will produce in a year 150 lbs. of mutton, or perhaps 200 gallons 

 of milk, but if planted with potatoes the excess of crop oyer seed 

 may be expected to be 5 tons at least. Moreover, with a little 

 bustling from manures and cultivation the 5 tons of potatoes can be 

 made into 10 ; but it would be far more diflBcult to double the pro- 

 duction of the grass. To take another example more in the line of 

 general practice, land under a rotation will produce 1000 11). of corn 

 per acre, and out of the straw and the roots and clover that occupy 

 part of the land will grow the same amount of meat as would have 

 been produced from the whole land had it been under grass. So the 

 laying doATu of land to grass that went on during the years 1872-1'J15 

 did not mean the exchange of corn for an equivalent of meat and 

 milk, but a dead loss of production of food. The loss is somewhat 

 disguised in the chart you have seen illustrating the changes in the 

 numbers of cattle, because that took no account of the increasing 

 dependence even of our live-stock upon imported cattle foods. At 

 tiie end of the period, for the five years 1909-13, the imported cattle 

 foods consumed in the United Kingdom amounted to over G million 

 tons per annum— barley, oats, rice, cakes, molasses, etc. (see Table I.). 

 It was all concentrated food, and translated into meat in the ratio 

 of 7 to 1 it represented 900,000 tons of meat, or one-third of the 

 whole amount of meat consumed in the country. Considered more 

 nicely on its energy value it was equivalent to, and if properly used 

 would have produced, 29 per cent, of the whole of the meat, milk, 

 eggs, poultry and dairy produce grown in the United Kingdom. So 

 even the grass land did not make all the animal food we counted as 

 the result of the change in our farming ; one quarter at least was 

 the outcome of imported feeding stuffs. 



And in what sort of a position had these changes — less arable 

 land, less production, more population — landed the country at the 

 outbreak of war ? 



Table II. shows the Royal Society's Committee's estimate of the 

 amounts and origin of the food consumed by our population for the 

 vears 1909-13. We were producing in all 42 per cent, of the food 



