146 PRODUCTION 



cultural land and increase the resources available for the main- 

 tenance of food-animals. 



Nevertheless, in spite of a probable large increase in the future 

 supplies of fertilisers, there will necessarity remain large areas of 

 the temperate regions distant from seaports and from centres of 

 production of commercial feritlisers, where the cost of transport 

 will make the utilisation of these materials more or less prohibitive. 

 These regions are now largely devoted to the production of cereals 

 or to pastures. As above described, the best means of exploitation 

 open to such extensive areas is to combine the most suitable forms 

 of stock-raising with crop cultivation, in view of threatened soil 

 exhaustion. This will take place all the more readily since new 

 cereal lands will probably be more easily found in the future than 

 new pasture lands, owing to the encroachment of the former upon 

 the latter. 



It appears, therefore, that the progress of agricultural science, 

 aiming always at maximum production, will favour some extension 

 of animal -rearing in occupied temperate lands, whether of the 

 high-farming type near centres of population or of the more remote 

 cereal-producing type. Though it is not likely that the full effect 

 of such progress will be felt for some years to come, changes in 

 this direction are not likely to be long delayed. In the meantime 

 the position has to be accepted as it exists, with a threatened 

 shortage of animal foodstuffs. 



The question of the supplies of fertilisers calls for close attention, 

 especially in connection with the more intensive, high-farming 

 methods common in Western Europe. Since in the past this 

 region has drawn upon the newer countries for concentrated feed- 

 stuffs and has thereby added to its soil fertility indirectly, it be- 

 comes necessary to inquire whether the latter countries are able 

 to maintain their rate of crop-production without threatened loss 

 of fertility. Otherwise the process would involve a transference 

 of part of the world's capital in soil fertility from the newer crop- 

 producing regions to the more intensive regions with predominant 

 animal-rearing industries a thing that cannot go on indefinitely 

 without unlimited areas to draw upon. 1 If fertilisers can be sup- 

 plied freely to these newer countries, the process may continue 

 for a long time, theoretically, at all events. Here distance from 

 seaports is an important determining factor, for cereals forwarded 

 to a seaport will bear charges in freight that fertilisers returned in 

 exchange may not. It is more probable that these inland regions 

 in the newer countries, when once they have passed the stage of 

 pioneering in agriculture, will tend to raise stock, and finish them 

 with their surplus feedstuffs, as a means of preserving fertility, 

 rather than continue to act as " hewers of wood and drawers of 

 water " by exporting large quantities of feedstuffs and importing 



1 See p. 142 above, Note 2, 



