M.— AGRICULTURE 245 



pale, tender meat which can be cooked at once. To provide these, 

 well-fattened carcases of 30 to 40 lb. at three or four months old are 

 required, and in their production perhaps the main consideration is 

 a liberal supply of milk. It is largely because of their excellence as milk 

 producers that the hill and mountain ewes have become so popular for 

 fat lamb production, other reasons being their small size and their ability 

 to find a living on lowland pastures during the winter with little expendi- 

 ture on either labour or feeding stuffs. They are available in large 

 numbers every autumn, when the drafts from the hill flocks are being 

 made, and it suits the lowland farmer better to buy these ewes than to 

 rear his own. His land is often too wet and unhealthy for a permanent 

 flock, and in most cases it can be put to more profitable use than grazing 

 yearling ewes. A very large proportion of the land laid down to grass 

 since the war is now stocked with such ' flying ' flocks, and recent work 

 of my colleague, E. J. Roberts, has shown that fresh young pastures give 

 far better results in fat lamb production than old pasture on similar land. 

 One of the questions regarding fat lamb production which I think is 

 likely to arise is that of securing satisfactory ' finish ' on the lambs when 

 reared on recently formed pastures which every year will become more 

 similar to old grass land. 



The special suitability of young grass for fat lamb production largely 

 accounts for the remarkable increase in the number of sheep kept in the 

 lowland areas of North Wales and the eastern counties of Scotland 

 (see Table VII). In both cases there is a considerable area of arable land 

 farmed on a rotation which includes a temporary ley. The very simple 

 modification of the system involved in extending the length of the ley 

 made it easy to secure the relatively attractive returns from fat lamb 

 production, and enabled farmers to reduce labour costs and unprofitable 

 corn production. 



Summing up the whole situation, we may say that we have almost 

 reached the state of affairs in which hill and mountain flocks are main- 

 tained primarily to produce breeding ewes of a hardy, heavy-milking 

 character ; a relatively few arable sheep have as their chief object the 

 breeding of rams of excellent mutton qualities mainly for crossing pur- 

 poses; and the draft ewes from the hills and the rams from the arable 

 flocks meet in the lowland pastures to produce lambs for sale almost 

 entirely in the summer and autumn months. 



The great concentration on production in summer is one of the 

 dangerous features of the present situation. It makes our supply over 

 the year very uneven, and there can be no doubt that this is one of the 

 reasons for the decrease in the proportion of home-fed meat shown in 

 Table IV. 



So far I have not discussed our sheep population as a whole, and in 

 doing so it is necessary to remember that it is composed of sections of 

 widely differing character. The graphs enable us to see the position at 

 a glance. The one for total numbers shows that there has been a great 

 deal of fluctuation, and indicates very well the big drop (nearly 4 millions) 

 caused by the fluke years 1879-80, and that brought about by food pro- 

 duction measures during the war. There is also evidence of a general 



