264 Allotments in England and Wales. [june, 



v/ould yield produce valued at about £^ in the official retail 

 market, of which must be deducted for cost of land and work- 

 ing generally. The plot is, however, a substantial economic 

 contribution to a household budget, and brings about a marked 

 decrease in the national food bill if the number of allotments 

 is taken at approximately 1,000,000. The allotment, however, 

 does not as a rule yield as much as it might easily be made to 

 do, and presents a great opportunity for increased production 

 by more intensive cultivation. 



A system of cropping='^ worked out by the officials of the Food 

 Production Department was described. Sir DanielHall next dealt 

 with the question of fertilisers, and emphasised the importance 

 of maintaining sufficient humus, especially on the London 

 clay. He advocated the keeping of some small live stock 

 upon the allotment. This is impossible on lo-rod allotments, 

 while on town allotments, where the owner lives at a distance, 

 live stock could not be protected. The ideal is to have enough 

 land on which to keep a pig. Rabbits are valuable as consumers 

 of otherwise unedible produce and as providers of food and 

 manure. There remained the very vexed question of tenure. 

 No adequate solution is at present possible. With building 

 land close to our towns at its present price, it seems as if the 

 allotment areas must continually shift on to land not yet ripe 

 for building. It should not, however, be impossible to ensure 

 that no large schemes of building will be sanctioned in future, 

 unless they provide a reasonable allowance of allotment land. 



In the third lecture, Sir Daniel HaU discussed certain points 

 which, in modern conditions of life, give a peculiar value to the 

 food grown on allotments. He touched upon the chemical 

 composition of food, dealing with the fat and carbohydrate 

 constituents which supply the main source of energy ; the 

 proteins which supply the waste of tissues ; and the mineral 

 salts, which are necessary to build up bone and to form part of 

 the constituent of blood. \Miile these constituents alone can 

 be summed up as food, recent investigation has shown that 

 there are other necessary elements in diet without which life 

 cannot be maintained. The addition to essential constituents 

 of a minute quantity of certain natural foods, such as milk, 

 immediately makes chemically-prepared food useful to the 

 animal, enabling it to thrive and to reproduce its kind 

 upon the experimental diet. Of these essential elements, in- 

 significant in amount, the action is not yet understood. They 



* The scheme is explained in a Leaflet (No. 315) recently issued by 

 the Ministry. The system of cropping was also illustrated in a chart pub- 

 lished on p. 83 of the issue of this Journal for April, 1920. 



