POPULATION AND CONSUMPTION 39 



failure of producing areas to keep pace with the demand." No 

 considerable areas, with the possible exception of Siberia, have 

 been opened up to the world since 1900 in such a way as to throw 

 enormous surplus supplies of animal produce upon the international 

 market, as happened in the two preceding decades. Areas already 

 developed have therefore been severely taxed to meet the increased 

 demand. Moreover, the newer prairie countries of the American 

 type whose vast surplus supplies, especially of animal products, 

 were rapidly made accessible to the world after about 1880, were 

 unfortunately in too many cases cropped and stocked without 

 regard to the future. In point of fact, these countries themselves, 

 and the food-importing countries that drew supplies from them, were 

 living during the last 20 years of the 19th century, partly upon 

 stocks of accumulated capital in the form of the humus deposits 

 of the prairie lands. These deposits were the result of ages of 

 accumulation, and once exhausted, their fertility could not easily 

 or quickly be restored. The most obvious form of soil exhaustion 

 was by successive crops of grain for sale off the farm ; but food 

 animals account for an important part of the American consumption 

 of grain, since cattle and pigs have always been " finished " on 

 maize and other cereals in the " Middle West." At the same time, 

 the over-stocking of the ranges further west, where the cattle were 

 reared till sold for fattening, was notorious down to about 1900. 1 

 It follows therefore, that exports of animal produce and of animal 

 feedstuff s to Europe were indirectly responsible for some share in 

 this deliberate soil exhaustion. Similar methods have also been 

 followed, though perhaps not to the same extent, in the prairie 

 plains of Canada and of Argentina. 



The ideal conditions for the production of large quantities of 

 cheap meat are apparently an abundance of fertile land covered 

 with rich natural grasses, together with a convenient and cheap 

 supply of fattening material (cereals, oil cakes, alfalfa) , and a fairly 

 sparse population inhabiting that land. The advance of 

 population, which has come so rapidly in North America and 

 moderately so in South America, has caused the disappearance 

 of the best and most accessible land from the pastoral areas, as 



1 American Economic Review, June, 1913, p. 448. Review of volume 

 entitled " Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference of the Bankers' 

 Committee on Agricultural Development and Education." Extract quoted : 

 " We are exhausting the elements of soil fertility by operations more akin 

 to mining than to conservative agriculture." Compare also the following 

 resolution passed by a meeting of Texas cattle owners on free ranges many 

 years ago, as characteristic of the spirit prevalent in America a generation 

 ago : " That none of us know, or care to know, anything about grasses, 

 native or otherwise, outside of the fact that for the present there are lots of 

 them, the best on record, and we are getting the most out of them while they 

 last." 



US. Dept. Agric., Farmers' Bulletin, No. 72. p. 13. 



