Can England Feed Herself?

Bruce Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 179, 20 October 1903, Page 3

Can England Feed Herself?

p, YJSS, IF SHE IRIKD Mr 0. \V. Soronson contributes to i the Contemporary Review a very in- , Lercsting article entitled " Back to the Land," in which he maintains that it is all jionsen.se to say that Kngland cannot feed her inhabitants!. The decadence of .British agriculture iie attributes to the l'udaiuental insecurity of sunk in other men's land. Low prices, unfair rents, and hi^h railway rates are as nothing orapar :d with this basic grievance. Giv"i sufficient capital, there would hive been ample food produced from English soil to feed all English nien and women. For lack of it the land has gone to pasture, and the nation goes its way toward moral, social, and physical degeneration. He admits that the price of wheat has fallen since 1874 from 6s lOd to 3s 4d a bushel, and barley from 4s lid to 3s. Oats have dropped from 3s. to 2s Id, but we grow more oats to-day than we did then. HOW WE CAN DO IT. In order to grow the whole of our cereals, dairy produce, beef, mutton, and a good portion of the fruits now purchased abroad, it is only necessary to bring our agricultural methods up to those of the Belgians and the Danes, and resume the cultivation of the land that has dropped out of cultivation in the last twenty-five years, and to break up six or seven million acres of our permanent pasture. At present we have only twenty million acres under tillage, and twenty-eight millions under pasture. We should then have thirty-two million acres under tillage and sixteen million acres under pasture. WHAT DENMARK DOES. Denmark, Mr Sorensen points out. has obtained her agriculturjl prosperity not from protective tariffs, but from land law reform, and he thinks the same result would follow in England if the cultivator had a right to his own improvements. English wheat land produces 30 bushels per acre, the Danish average is 39 bushels per acre. Our barley crop is 33 bushels, as against 40 bushels in Belgium. The British cow gives 30 per cent, less milk than the Danish one, and eats quite as much, if not more. If our cows were as gno.i milkers as those of the Danes, we could produce as much milk as we do to-day after reducing the number of our cows by 1,200,000. But it would require 2,000,000 extra cows of Danish quality to produce the 4,200.000 cwts of butter which we import. If we brought our four million cows up to the Danish standard and added another 11 million to their number, we could produce all our milk, butter and cheese at home. THE ALTERNATIVE TO DECAY. To produce all the pork, bacon, and h;:rn that we need would require two million acres more tillage than we have at present, and would also require another half million acres to produce the grain for poultry* to supply ourselves with the 2,000,000,000 eggs which we at present import from the Continent. Mr Sorensen concludes his paper by insisting upon the fact that the physique of our town bred population is deteriorating. He doubts whether three successive generations can survive town life at all. That being the case, the cry of " Back to the Land " seems to him to be the watchword of our national survival.