FEEDING STUFFS 177 



they have felt that they could rely on rule of 

 thumb knowledge gained by their own past ex- 

 perience. Home-grown hay, straw, and roots pro- 

 vide the bulk of the fodder they require, and their 

 purchases are practically confined to linseed cake, 

 cotton cake, maize and wheat offals. These few 

 items, together with a few home-grown oats for 

 their horses and tail corn for their poultry and pigs, 

 practically exhaust the list of feeding stuffs used 

 by the great body of farmers. 



As long as prices remained about constant, or 

 altered slowly and regularly, rule-of-thumb know- 

 ledge of the value and general properties of the few 

 feeding stuffs mentioned above sufficed to enable 

 farmers to produce meat, milk, and work with 

 some kind of success, though their practice in- 

 cluded many instances of ignorant wastefulness. 

 But when the war introduced new conditions and 

 prices of feeding stuffs rose suddenly and irregu- 

 larly by from 30 to 100 per cent., rule-of-thumb 

 knowledge entirely failed to meet the emergency. 

 Practical experience could not show farmers how 

 to buy, and still less how to use, feeding stuffs 

 which they had never seen before. 



Although many feeding stuffs, which before the 

 war went to Germany, were forced on to British 

 markets at comparatively low prices, farmers, from 

 lack of knowledge of their value and properties, 

 were compelled to adhere to their old-accustomed 

 linseed cake, cotton cake, maize and wheat offals, 



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