OUR FOOD SUPPLY IN TIME OF WAR 323 



Besides, it is not bread stuffs only, but other articles 

 of food would have to be stored, for we are as a 

 nation in the same unhappy position with regard to 

 them as we are with regard to wheat. The cost of 

 doing this would be enormous. The building or rent- 

 ing of granaries, the deterioration of the food, the 

 cost of administration, the vast amount of capital 

 employed, of which perhaps neither principal nor 

 interest might be ultimately realized, or only partly 

 realized : these and other considerations might fairly 

 make any Government hesitate before adopting a 

 scheme of storage as a permanent and settled policy, 

 whatever it might do as a temporary expedient, while 

 a better, cheaper, and a more effective system is grow- 

 ing to completion. 



These various proposals and recommendations 

 serve to illustrate in a striking way our unique posi- 

 tion among nations of having to import five-sixths 

 of our food stuffs, while at the same time millions of 

 acres of our own land are uncultivated. We turn 

 from them with the strengthened conviction that 

 the stackyard of the farmer is the only natural and 

 proper place to store wheat for a nation, but under 

 our present system the stackyard must remain empty.^ 



speaks of a farmer who made it a practice to buy wheat when it was 

 cheap ; to dry it and keep it till the price was high. His method was to 

 dry it upon a hair cloth in a malt kiln with no other fuel than clean white 

 straw, never suffering it to have a stronger heat than that of the sun. 

 After this process the wheat would keep sweet for many years. This man 

 had occasionally in his granaries as much as five thousand quarters 

 of dried wheat. " He was a most sincere and honest yeoman, who 

 from a small substance he began with, left behind him about forty 

 thousand pounds, the greatest part whereof was acquired by this drying 

 method." (The " Horse Hoeing Husbandry," by Jethro TuU, 1822.) 



^ Up towards the end of the eighteenth century England was a wheat- 

 exporting country. Ancient writers speak of the " fertile soil of Britain 

 bearing heavy crops of corn," of the large exports of wheat, "of 800 



