WORLD MEAT SUPPLY.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXIII, 5 February 1923, Page 8

WORLD MEAT SUPPLY.

FROZEN NORTH SOURCE OF FOOD. I (By Vilhjalmur Stefar.sson). My first year in the Aret e I saw seery thing through a haze of romance and did not for a while realise that it was a very commonplace country. But •during the nine more years I spent it here the realisation kept gradually £rowing on me that one of the chief problems of Canada and Siberia, is to T • gin to make use of all the vast quau~t ties of grass that go to waste in the jiorth every year. The obvious thing to do is to find s-tune domestic animal that will eat the 4_.'ass. Then when the animal is big 4i nd fat it -should be butchered and -shipped where the food is needed. With respect to the grazing re--4 ources of the far north, we shall take ihe educated Canadian, American or European as we find him, already misinformed. At first he -considers it revolutionary and unbelievable that the northern half of Canada is a vast .pasture. But it is true. The world’s largest area of grass lands is undoubtedly in the northern Eurasia and to it .only is Canada second. Northern Norway, northern Sweden, northern Finland, -northern Russia and northern Siberia are mountainous in some parts and forested in others, but in general they form together a great prairie land variously estimated at from four million to six million square miles, or anything from the fiill size of the United States to one and onehalf times that -area. But in northern Canada we have the next largest grazing area in the world, one and a half or two million square miles of prairie land, equal to half the area of the United States. There are some mountains and some rocky hills. In some places there are alkali flats without vegetation and in some places there are forests. But in the main it is a verdure-clad prairie. Whether in square miles or in tonnage of flowering plants, the grazing areas of the Argentine or of Texas are insignificant in comparison. These grass lands are not only the northern portion of the continent, but also the islands that lie north of Canada, even to the north coast of the most northerly of them. The vegetation is only in part of a typically polar nature strange to southerners. In part it consists of common plants, such as various' sedges, blue-grass, timothy, golden-rod, dandelion, bluebell, poppy, primrose, anemone, and the Tike. More than 115 species of flowering plants are known to exist in Ellesmere Island, the most northerly of the Canadian islands. Sir Clements Markham says in his “Life of Sir Leopold McClintock,” that in the polar regions in general there are 332 species of mosses, 250 lichens, B 8 ferns, and 762 species of flowering plants. The preponderance of flowering plants over non-flowering plants is conspicuous in the number of species, but it is more conspicuous in tonnage. I think there can be no doubt that for every ton of mosses and lichens on the lands beyond the arctic circle there are at least 10 tons of flowering plants. That mosses and lichens everywhere prevail in the school book accounts of the far north, while in the north itself they are inconspicuous as compared with the flowering plants, would seem unbelievable if it were an isolated untruth. As a matter of fact the school books are full of just that sort of misinformation. We, the common people, believe it, although the specialists have always known better. The stockman who learns that vegetation abounds in the North will ask whether you can raise cattle or sheep up there. The answer is 'that you could if you wanted to, but it would not pay. During the years of 1918-21 I have talked' with many cattlemen in such places as Alberta, Montana and Arizona, and it is clear that during at least the latter two of these three years cattle-raising has not paid. The chief trouble is that in most of these places you have to feed and shelter cattle for part of the -year. By the time you have ploughed the land, planted alfalfa, bought the required machinery, put the hay into stack- barns, and fed your cattle, though it be for only two or three months of the year, you have put more money into them than at present prices you pan get out of them. If it does not pay to raise cattle in Idaho where you feed them for three months of the year, it would not pay to raise cattle in the polar regions where you would hare to feed them at least six months in the year. But it would pay famously to raise cattle in Montana or Idaho if you did not have to feed them or stable them and did not have to worry about the possibility of a blizzard coming once every I few years to kill off part of the herd. Correspondingly there should be a profit in raising any domestic animal in the North if that animal required no shelter or feeding and produced meat that commanded! a fair price. We have such an animal in the reindeer.

There has been irregularity of usage as to the words “reindeer” and' “caribou;” The usage seems to be crystallising now. We speak of reindeer when we mean domestic animals and caribou when we refer to those that are ».ild. There are many kinds of reindeer and many kinds of caribou. In general, reindeer are smaller than caribou, but the biological differences seem to be less than those between corresponding breeds of cattle, as for instance, Jerseys and Guernseys on one side and shorthorns and polled angus on the other.

Those who have no personal familiarity with the Polar regions find! it strange that these animals flourish there. But they are native animals. Each creature flourishes best in a peculiar environment of its own. Cattle and giraffes oan fend for themselves in the south, but would die in the north. Reindeer and caribou flourish in the north, but would probably not get along very well in the tropics. They are in no more need of shelter from a blizzard than a Texas steer needs shelter from the rain, nor are they more likely to freeze to death than a giraffe is to die of sunstroke. Tlie reindeer is no more likely to starve to death in the north because' the ground is lightly covered with snow part of the time than a fish is to die of thirst because the ocean is salty all the time.

So far as I know, no man has ever seen any evidence of caribou being cold in winter or of their being seriously incommoded by a blizzard. For more than 10 years I have in winter made my living in the far north by hunting them, and as a hunter I know their habits even better than I did those of the half-wild cattle of a cowboy. We have there, therefore, animals that are in no need of shelter from storm or cold. The only time reindeer might conceivably need it would be the calving season in the spring. It is true that the calves are sometimes frozen to death during the first five or 10 hours after birth, but this happens so rarely that the death rate among reindeer calves in Alaska, during the last 20 years, has, according to the figures of the United States’ Department of the Interior, never been as high in even the worst years as the average death rate among range calves in Montana or Alberta.

Next comes the quality of the meat. This question can be answered in many ways, although none is more conclusive than the evidence as to price. Stockholm, Sweden, is one of the first cities of Europe, with a population of between three and four hundred thousand people. I wrote a letter to the Chamber of Commerce of .Stockholm and have received a long reply which may be summarised as follows: Reindeer meat has been on the market in Stockholm for several decades. Apparently it was looked down upon in the beginning as an inferior meat because produced by a people looked upon as inferior —the Laplanders. Gradually, however, the meat increased in favor, until something like 10 years ago it came about to the level of the various domestic meats. It is now sold in the city by -the hundreds of tons each year, and last winter the average price of reindeer meat ranged from equality up to 25 per cent, higher than that of beef for corresponding cuts. .

Another answer as to the quality of reindeer meat is found in the American market. The winter of 1920-21 the Alaska firm, Lomen and Co., of Nome, shipped to the United States 1600 reindeer carcases which were sold to the best clubs and hotels for prices between three and four times as high as corresponding cuts of beef. At a time when the big meat packers

were selling the best American beef in New York city, wholesale at 11 cents a. pound, reindeer meat was being Sold wholesale for 35 or 40 cents a pound, depending on the quantity purchased. For every man who says beef is better than reindeer you can now find another who says reindeer is better than bqef. There will be no difficulty in introducing reindeer meat into the United States or into any civilsed country on the score of prejudice. The thing has already been tried out,and it is found that the demand is vastly greater than the supply. This will probably always remain the ease, for great as are the ranges of the north ’they will never supply as much meat as the world would like to have. Meat producing in other lands will decrease so much more rapidly than th® northern reindeer production can increase that the world’s meat supply in proportion to the mouths there are to feed will probably never again be as high, as it is this year. Here, then, we have the answer to the old question, “WhAt is the nort i good for?” It is going to become the greatest meat-producing area of the world and eventually the only area where meat is produced on a large scale. This will not be because the south could' not compete with the north if it wanted to, but rather because the south is not going to want to compete. It is through the good fortune than we are habituated to thinking of venison and through the accident that reindeer meat differs scarcely at all from beef and ovibos differs not at all, that we shall have no difficulty in introducing these meats. While a few people will refrain from tasting them, the demand of the others who want them will always be in excess of theWupply of either or both of these meats. People who do not consult the census returns are in the hab:t of laughing at the Malthusian doctrine of the increase of the world’s population. But those who look at .the census do not laugh. His was not a prophecy but a mathematical calculation, and it is coming true l as rapidly fis he said and as inexorably as things do which go by mathematical law. Professor Raymond Ptearl, the chief statistician of the United States Food Administration, said during the last year of the war that, unless some new source of meat be found, *and if population increases the next half century at the same rate as the last half, steaks will be within 50 years as hard to get as cavier is now. He had not then thought of the possibility of largescale meat production in the far north, but even now he has modified his conclusion only slightly. The north will produce great quantities of meat, but never nearly enough. The most enthusiastic of us do not dream that the increase of the northern herds can keep pace with the increase of the world’s human population, and at the same time compensate for the decrease of cattle in the south, as the ranch lands .there are progressively converted into farms and gardens.