Recent Experiences in laying doivn Land to Grass. 125 
arable at the beginning of this century — land that cannot be 
tilled profitably now, and that cannot be restored to its former 
condition within any reasonable limit of time, if ever. 
Hence it would appear that if the cultivated ground is being 
at the present time gradually converted to pasture, it is only 
being brought back to its earlier state, and nothing wrong is 
beinof done. But it must not be foro^otten to what extent the 
condition and numbei'S of the population are altered. Before 
this century we were able to feed ourselves, we were even at 
times exporters of agricultural produce, whereas now we are 
importers of every sort of food. Of wheat alone, we only grow 
about one-third of our annual requirements. 
Some tables at the end of this paper (pp. 154 and 155) show 
the changes that have occurred in the last decade, the figures 
being taken from the Agricultural Returns. Close upon two 
million acres have been added to the permanent grass lands of 
Great Britain in the ten years, an increase of fourteen per cent. 
It may be i-eckoned that IZ. an acre represents the diminished 
cost of labour on the land converted to grass ; so 2,000,000L 
per annum, a sum that would support 50,000 families of five 
persons each, or 250,000 people, has been lost, or, more correctly, 
has not been produced by the laud. The tables also demonstrate 
that there is an actual falling-off in the quantity of produce in 
the period, in England alone, of the value of 4, 935, 542/. This 
is found by taking the value of all sorts of corn, including straw, 
and of cattle, sheep, and pigs, at present prices, for both 1877 
and 1887 : the cattle, sheep, and pigs together giving an increase 
of 3,362,481/., and the com a decrease of 8,298,023/. Had the 
calculations been based on the prices current at the two dates, 
the apparent loss would have been ten times greater. 
In the Agricultural Eeturns there is a very intei'esting 
table, comparing the acreage of crops and grasses in the grazing 
counties and the corn-growing counties of England. Here the 
relative increase of permanent pasture is, as might have been 
expected, greatest in the grain-producing division, being four- 
teen per cent, in the grazing and eighteen and a half per cent, 
in the corn-growing districts during the ten years. Evidence 
is thus given of the experimental nature of much of the new 
grass land. It has been allowed to fall down to grass, or it has 
been sown down to grass, because it has been found impossible 
to cultivate it remuneratively in the face of the great recent fall 
in price of cereals. A return to a higher level of values would, 
in all probability, cause a reconversion of this so-called perma- 
nent pasture to arable land ; but in the meantime, while the 
newly laid down land is struggling to assert its permanency, 
there is a loss of producing power, as shown by Table No. IV. 
