1917] AGRICULTURE IN WaAR-TIME. 211 
AGRICULTURE IN WAR-TIME. 
By FRANK T. SHutTt, M.A., D.Sc. 
Dominion Chemist. 
EDUCATION. 
The war has many lessons for those who will learn them, sad lessons 
many of them certainly, but valuable lessons for the most part for the 
peoples and the nations involved in this great conflict in which we of 
the British Empire with our Allies are battling for righteousness, justice 
and honour. Our view point on many matters has been shifted, but 
what is perhaps of greater importance I think we have a clearer and 
better estimate of the things that in the long run really matter in this life, 
a truer conception and more intense realization of the inherent rightness 
and wrongness in those qualities and characteristics which determine 
our attitude and actions towards one another, whether as individuals or 
as nations. 
It is not, however, our purpose to consider these matters, important 
as they are to us asa people, but what I have said may serve as an intro- 
duction, or indeed explanation of the statement that the estimate and 
conception of the people at large as regards agriculture has greatly 
changed in these later, let us hope, latter days of the war. We have I 
think awakened or at least are awakening to the realization that the food 
supply, which means agriculture, is playing a vitally important part, 
not merely in the welfare, but the very existence, of the nations at war. 
The food supply may be the factor that will turn the scale in the final 
winning out of the war, certainly it is only second in importance to the 
supply of ammunition and the successful prosecution of arms on the 
field of battle. We at least know that it is mainly the shortage of food 
in Germany that prompted the recent overtures for peace from that 
country. 
And this matter of the importance of agriculture as an industry 
affecting the welfare of a country has touched us nearer home. In the 
recent advances in the price of our food stuffs, more especially pro- 
nounced since the outbreak of the war, we of the towns and cities— 
consumers and not producers—are learning the stern lesson of how 
dependent we are on the output of agriculture. Until a few years ago, 
living in this land of plenty and of cheap food, we never gave a thought 
as to how this food was produced or where it came from. The inter- 
