M.—AGRICULTURE 227 
the farmer’s other primary raw materials. The process of expansion 
began with the opening up of the North American prairie for corn 
growing, following the building of railways and the invention of the 
binder. At first it was confidently predicted that the flood of corn 
would be only temporary, since a few years of ‘ prairie farming’ must 
exhaust the most fertile soil in the world. But the prairie soil was found 
to be different stuff from that of Western Europe, and its exhaustion 
proved to be a vain hope, or a groundless fear, according to the point 
of view. Moreover, one new country after another went through the 
process of agricultural development, and the problem of transport was 
solved not only for corn and wool, but also for meat, dairy produce, fruit 
and, indeed, for every commodity except the most bulky or the extremely 
perishable. But it is not only transport developments that have thrown 
open new fields to the farmer. Irrigation schemes and dry-farming 
technique have added great areas of what was formerly desert. Plant 
breeders, by producing quick-maturing strains of plants, have extended 
the northern limits of cultivation by a belt that embraces hundreds of 
millions of acres. The growing control of human and animal disease 
is creating the possibility of settlement and agricultural development 
over vast areas of the tropics which, as yet, have been hardly touched. 
Thus the old fear of overpopulation, which has coloured so much of 
past economic thought, has been removed to a distance that now seems 
incalculably far. 
Apart from land, the most important of the farmer’s primary raw 
materials are fertilisers, and here it is enough to say there can be no 
anxiety about future supplies. The crisis in connection with the supply 
of nitrogen, which seemed thirty years ago to be approaching fast, has 
been completely averted. Nitrogen is now available to the farmer, in 
infinite quantity, at less than half its pre-war price. 
The other cause of the growing abundance of agricultural produce 
has been, of course, the application of the rapidly increasing body of 
scientific knowledge to the business of plant and animal production. 
I do not propose to weary you with a catalogue of recent advances in 
agricultural science, or to show how these have been translated by the 
farmer into improvements in practice. Two or three examples must 
suffice. ‘The latest report on the Agricultural Output of England and 
Wales shows that (through the application of the sciences of genetics 
and nutrition) the average output of eggs, per bird, increased by 20 per 
cent. in six years. ‘The use of the tractor and the combine harvester 
enables a reduction, in the labour cost of corn production, of more 
than 50 per cent. The output of meat, per acre of grassland, has been 
increased, at Cockle Park and on much similar land elsewhere, by more 
than roo per cent., through the use of what was once a worthless by- 
product of our steel industry. A simple and cheap remedy has been 
found, almost the other day, for the ‘ rot’ in sheep which has often in 
the past killed a million sheep and more in a single year. And so on— 
more farm land and more fertilisers, more machines and more science, all 
leading to the same result of cheaper, easier and more abundant production. 
I am not suggesting that overproduction is the sole cause of the 
