Food Problem Individualised 211 



for the two crops. There are other leguminous 

 things, but in the soil and climate of Connaught 

 I have found the vetch more suitable than any of 

 them. Its cultivation is simple, and the pro- 

 duction of rape is simpler still. Given plenty of 

 these, we can produce meat and milk in abundance, 

 even on " bad " land, at least from May to 

 November, and the rape stands good for winter 

 also. To be ready for winter feeding, it can be 

 sown in July, in land from which the vetch crop 

 has been taken. The fuller detail of the process 

 will be found in another chapter. 



To the educated agriculturist my facts are 

 elementary, but how many of our agriculturists 

 are educated ? In England, they sometimes do 

 the right thing, but without knowing why. In 

 Ireland, they nearly always do the wrong thing, 

 with a reasoned defence for it. The man who 

 wants meat, milk and butter in the towns may 

 wonder why, with such a simple solution of the 

 food problem before us, we have to pay prices so 

 unnecessarily excessive to the rich and practically 

 prohibitive to the poor. The British working man 

 is no longer in a position to eat British beef, and 

 the tendency is to deprive him of meat in any 

 form, while we have a Departmental Commission 

 to discover, among other things, why the children 

 cannot get milk even in the agrarian villages of 

 Ireland. The Irish Department of Agriculture 

 had recently a commission to discover why the 

 lack of pigs, and now they start their third com- 

 mission of the kind, to find out how Ireland may 



