256 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



Beveridge, addressing the Economics Section two years ago, dismisses 

 this fear as regards the world at large : whatever may be the troubles 

 in Britain, ' the limits of agricultural expansion are indefinitely far.' On 

 the whole that seems a very safe proposition ; it has been so amply fulfilled 

 for the last hundred and fifty years — during the greatest expansion of 

 population the world has ever known — that it would almost seem to be 

 necessarily true, especially as it can be buttressed by agricultural experi- 

 ments showing the enormous potentialities of production from the soil. 



There is, however, one aspect of the case that appears to have received 

 insufficient attention : the capacity of agriculture to provide food for the 

 people depends upon the extent of land available as well as upon the 

 pitch of cultivation — to what degree can the tuning-up of methods be 

 made to compensate for a non-expanding acreage ? The first step towards 

 a more exact consideration of the problem may therefore be an estimate 

 of the amount of cultivated land that is required to maintain one unit 

 of population — man, woman, and child. 



We may make our estimates by either of two methods — abstract or 

 actual. The Food (War) Committee of the Royal Society adopted the 

 figure of 2,618 calories as representing the minimal daily energy require- 

 ment of one unit of the population, and calculated that the actual United 

 Kingdom consumption in the five years 1909-1913 amounted to 3,091 calories 

 per head per day. An average English acre of wheat yielding 32 bushels 

 will produce food, in the shape of wheat, flour, and pig obtained from the 

 offals, of a calorie value of about 2| millions. As the average consumption 

 was about ri3 million calories per head per year, we "arrive at the conclu- 

 sion that one acre of wheat would support more than two head, the 

 relationship being more exactly 0-45 acre to feed one unit of population. 

 But this figure is of no service in our more general consideration. The 

 yield of wheat of 32 bushels per acre is far above that of the wheat- 

 producing areas, and is that of only a few selected countries growing but a 

 limited acreage. It is, again, the produce of land under the plough, and 

 is consumed in the main as a vegetable product. 



The great areas of grassland have a lower output of energy than the 

 cultivated land, and the conversion of vegetable into animal food, whether 

 of natural or cultivated fodder crops, is always attended by a great waste 

 of energy. In the most economic production of pig-meat or milk the 

 energy recovered is only about one-sixth of that consumed, and this 

 represents the machine at the top of its efficiency. The longer period of 

 beef -production results in a recovery as beef of only one-eighteenth of 

 the energy consumed, and in practice the actual wastage of fodder and 

 feeding-stuffs doubles or trebles the inevitable losses by conversion. 

 And just as man is not a vegetarian making the most of the mere sustaining 

 power of the land, so he does not use the land for food alone, but also for 

 drink, for wool and fibre and other industrial materials, and for amenities. 

 You may remember Maitland's argument that in the early mediaeval times 

 of Domesday Book and the two or three centuries following, about one- 

 third of the arable land of the country was devoted to beer. 



We shall not get far on the theoretical basis, and I have only mentioned 

 it as indicating the order of the superior limit of the maintaining power 

 of land. 



