THE OBJECTIVE IX PRODUCTION 159 



annually in the United Kingdom — ^just sufiicicnt to 

 meet the demand for table use. 



In 1914 the German potato crop was fifty million 

 tons — ten times that of ours ! And note that the German 

 people only consume ten million tons as potatoes ; the 

 other forty million tons are used as raw material in the 

 manufacture of a countless variety of conmiodities such 

 as potato spirit, flour, starch, imitation corn starch, sago 

 and tapioca. 



The residuum, after making potato spirit, forms a 

 valuable food for live stock — supplying the carbo- 

 hydrates which we import in the form of maize from 

 the Argentine and United States ; and we pay over 

 ;(^20,ooo,ooo for this annually. 



Germany is well served with potato dr}dng plants ; 

 it is only within the last few years that we have had any 

 such drying plants in this country. Yet it is far more 

 economic to dry the potatoes than to put them in " pies," 

 covered with earth, as we do ; it saves a considerable 

 percentage of waste, through potatoes going bad, and it 

 saves the transport of thousands of tons of valueless 

 water, for the potato contains over 60 per cent of water. 



I cannot but feel that the ,(^250,000, advanced by the 

 Ministry of Agriculture to encourage the development 

 of home-grown sugar, would have been more efi"ectivcly 

 applied in developing potato production and its sub- 

 sidiary industries. 



Potatoes can form the mainstay in pig feeding, so 

 that if this crop were properly developed we could have 

 a much greater supply of home-grown pork than we had 

 during the war ; good pork is undoubtedly the most 

 valuable type of meat, for it supplies the essential fats, 

 and how much we suffered from the bad quality of pork 

 and bacon imported from the United States ! 



