358 



On increasing our Supplies of Animal Food. 



valuable property of the hog, though hardly connected with this 

 subject, is the rapidity with which it multiplies ; and this is apt to 

 bias the judgment in its favour. Certain it is that, however pro- 

 fitable to the cottager as the savings-bank of scraps that would 

 otherwise be lost, the hog has not been found profitable when 

 cultivated as the exclusive consumer of the farm produce. A 

 farm near this was once wholly devoted to the produce of pork 

 and bacon ; the full details of its history I have not been able to 

 obtain, but the result is well known, that the farmer lost money 

 by the speculation and soon abandoned it. And the general idea 

 I believe to be that, except for breeding and sale as " stores," 

 hogs on farms should be kept not many more in number than 

 will suffice to consume the " waste." 



Of the sheep, by which probably as much as by any other 

 animal the green produce of our arable lands is consumed, I 

 have only to say, that the result of a winter's consumption by a 

 healthy flock of well-bred Cotswolds, folded on 30 acres of 

 Swedish turnips, was the yield of 1 lb. of mutton for every 150 

 lbs. of the food ; a quantity which I believe to be as great, or 

 greater, than is yielded by feeding cattle. And there is this in 

 favour of the impression of the superiority of sheep to oxen as 

 converters of green food into meat, that of about 150 sheep, cross- 

 bred Cotswolds and Downs, weighed alive and sold by weight the 

 winter before last, about — of their weight alive* was mutton — 

 a proportion nearly the same as ~, or a Smithfield out of an 

 imperial stone — while of 20 or 30 oxen that we have weighed 

 alive, and as beef, certainly not more than ~ has been carcase. 



The profit of feeding is certainly no index to its produce, which 

 alone, it would seem, is the subject proposed by the Society; 

 and therefore, however satisfactorily the following figures show 

 that great averages by no means resemble the maxima of the 

 items out of which they arise, we do not lay any great stress 

 upon them as answering the question we are now considering. 

 They are extracts from the annual balance-sheet during the 

 past four years f of this farm, where the system adopted has 

 been exclusively the purchase of cattle and sheep, feeding and 

 selling them. 



and there is no doubt that in very fat animals the proportion of offal is smaller. But 

 so far as our experience goes of beef in the condition in which butchers on the average 

 buy, not more than 55 per cent, of the live weight is carcase ; and this has been in the 

 case of a good breed. 



* The wool was heavy upon them at the time, which would diminish the proportion 

 of meat to weight. 



f Shillings and pence omitted. 



