62 AGRICULTURAL ORGANISATION 



POULTRY AND EGGS. 



Inasmuch as a very large quantity indeed, in the aggre- 

 gate, of poultry must be kept by cottagers and town or 

 suburban residents not coming within the scope of the 

 official returns, statistics relating only to the number on 

 farms of over an acre in size can give no adequate idea of 

 the sum total of poultry in Great Britain. It may be, as 

 the Report suggests, that the greater part of the less-than- 

 one-acre production thus excluded is consumed by the 

 poultry-keepers themselves ; but one of the essential objects 

 of the co-operative poultry societies of to-day is to enable 

 " small " as well as " large " poultry-keepers to market their 

 surplus stocks to advantage. 



Still, taking these inadequate official returns as they 

 stand, one learns from them that the total value of the 

 output of eggs and poultry from the over-one-acre holdings 

 in Great Britain is estimated at about 5,000,000. To this 

 figure must be added the value of the considerable supplies 

 raised in Ireland. The home production, however, is still so 

 far short of the demand that, as reference to the table already 

 given will show, the value of the eggs imported into the 

 United Kingdom in 1911 was nearly 8,000,000. 



THE SITUATION IN BRIEF. 



The final outcome of a comparison between food imports 

 and home production is to show that, great as are the former 

 in magnitude, they are still materially less than the food 

 supplies we raise for ourselves. 



This fact was well shown by Mr. R. H. Rew, C.B., one of 

 the assistant secretaries of the Board of Agriculture, in a 

 paper on " The Nation's Food Supply," which he read at 

 the 1912 meeting of the British Association. Dividing home 

 production from imports, deducting exports, and omitting 

 sugar, tea, coffee and cocoa, for which there is no corre- 

 sponding home production, Mr. Rew gave the following 



