208 My Little Farm 



Submarine, my facts may excite envy rather 

 than afford a practical example ; but there is 

 plenty of idle soil in the United Kingdom, and if it 

 lies unproductive, this is mainly the fault of the 

 townsman himself. He has not yet come in sight 

 of the three acres and a cow, because he has 

 dictated policy for a hand-to-mouth existence in 

 the town alone, forgetting that the soil was the 

 last resource between him and starvation. He 

 has insisted on " cheap " food from abroad until 

 his scheme threatens his access to food from 

 anywhere. My own plot of the United Kingdom 

 is not more than thirty-five acres, and its annual 

 value is only 6 ; but most of the home products 

 which have enabled me to solve the food problem 

 come out of one rood, and the other 139 roods, 

 producing at the same rate, would make more 

 than ^500 a year. If the townsman has not the 

 life for porridge, and cannot produce his own milk, 

 that is his own affair. There is no lack of land, 

 and I have for more than twenty years been a 

 townsman, in the intensest sense of the term. A 

 healthy life gives a man an appetite for healthy 

 food, and it costs much less on the whole. The 

 real question is not the money income, but the 

 kind of man you can maintain on it. 



Our feeding for the cattle and the horse was 

 a still more serious item, commercially considered. 

 Nobody about us could keep cattle without con- 

 centrated foods, chiefly imported, and the prices 

 of these had advanced at least 50 per cent. In 

 the market value of the cow and of her products, 



