THE FODDER CROPS OF THE PUNJAB, 



CHAPTER L FOOD OP CATTLE. 



1. From the nature of the country, agriculture must always be the 

 introductory. cllie ^ occupation of the people of the 



Punjab. According to the recent 



census the population of the 29 districts was nearly 20 millions. In round 

 figures the cultivated area in 1906-07 amounted to 28 million acres, and 

 pasture lands including Government forests to 18 millions. The well-irrigated 

 area was 5 million acres, dependent 011 quarter of a million masonry and from 

 30 to 40,000 kachcha wells. The area protected by canals was 6f millions of 

 acres an area to which large additions will be made. An area of 275,000 acres 

 was recorded as obi, and the unirrigated area exceeded 16 million acres. Accord- 

 ing to the cattle census of 1909 there were in that year 2,169,000 ploughs and 

 288,000 carts. The horned cattle available for draft were 



4,247,000 bullocks, and 

 625,000 male buffaloes. 



The former figures include bulls, and if we exclude animals used for 

 breeding, we may say there are 4| millions of animals available to plough the 

 land, work the wells, thresh the corn, draw the carts, and work sugar, oil and 

 flour mills. Camels are used for ploughing to some extent in Hissar and 

 Ferozepore, and in Eawalpiridi a donkey or a cow is sometimes seen yoked 

 with a bullock. The milch kine consisted of 3,384,000 cows and 2,241,000 

 buffaloes, and the young stock, male and female, was returned as amounting 

 to 3.820,000. Female buffaloes are far more valuable than cows, and are 

 steadily growing in favour. They are also coarser feeders. The only districts 

 in which little attention is still paid to them are a group of four in the north- 

 west of the province, Jhelum, Rawalpindi, Attock and Mianwali, and two 

 of the south-western districts, Muzaffargarh and Dera Ghazi Khan (see for 

 details statement I). Roughly there are 14^ millions of horned cattle depend- 

 ent for natural grazing on 18 million acres of waste, much of it of poor 

 quality, which they have to share with 4 million sheep and 5|/ million 

 goats. The large areas of waste are found in a few districts, mostly in the 

 west of the province and in the hills. In the four plain districts of the Jullun- 

 dur division the waste is only equal to 12 per cent, of the cultivation, in the 

 Lahore division excluding Gujranwala it is 20, and in the Delhi division 

 excluding Simla 21 per cent. The products of the waste are supplemented 

 by those of the fallow and by the grasses and other plants weeded out of the 

 cropped fields. It is obvious that in the Punjab a very large acreage must be 

 devoted to raising food for cattle, and that fodder crops must be of vast 

 importance. Broadly speaking, the province is now secure from widespread 

 food famines, but fodder famines can still inflict enormous losses on the 

 people. 



2. The following extracts from Moreland's Agriculture of the United 



Provinces are worth quoting as an in- 



Constituents of food. ,. , ,, , 



troduction to the subject : 



" Tliis food is produced in the parent plant from the materials that it has collected from 

 the soil or the air and passes into the developing seed ; large numbers of different substances 

 are stored in this way by different plants, but they can be grouped in two main classes 

 according as they do or do not contain combined nitrogen .... The non-nitrogenous 

 matter is usually either starch or oil, while the nitrogenous matter is in various forms which 



are known collectively as albuminoids or proteids _ Animals are made 



Up of precisely the same elementary substances as plants, though they require to consume these 

 substances in different forms, and convert them into such tilings as skin, bones and muscles, 

 not leaves, flowers, or seed. We have seen that the most important product of plants from 

 the nutritive point of view are (1) starch and the various sugars, and (2) the proteids ; when 

 speaking of animals it is more convenient to call these respectively work food and flesh food. 



