THE FOOD SUPPLY OF ENGLAND.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5424, 15 August 1878, Page 3

THE FOOD SUPPLY OF ENGLAND.

With the reserve that summer is the real mistress of the year, and that spring is but her handmaid, all may yet turn out well. Year by year we depend more on our dairies, our pastures, and our green crops, and less on the grain crops that used to be the turning point of every private and public calculation. England has accepted the position, once through the acme of folly, that she imports as much wheat as she grows at Horae, and literally depends for half her bread on the winds and waves and the uncertain elements of the political atmosphere. Now, for ha l f a century and more the plough has been receding from our towns. Rustics arriving from vast plains of arable lands, whether alluvial or reclaimed down, find themselves for the first time among green fields and hedgerows as they come within the sight of tall chimney stacks. But the change of husbandry has spread over the whole island. The milk can now travel fifty and even a hundred miles, and other dairy produce comes as regularly as the post from Landsend and every corner of the sister island. Every breakfast and every nursery is now supplied with a cheapness and profusion which fifty years ago was unknown except in gentlemen’s houses and the bettor class of farms. What people are used to they depend on, anti the dairy has become a necessity to the consumer, and therefore to the producer. Eight years ago a general and long-continued drought stopped the growth of grass, and consequently the yield of milk. Of course, the cattle themselves starved, and did not soon recover their condition, the dairy farmers could not pay their rent, and the British public had to pay more for a less quantity of what to them Rad been a necessity of life. The total loss was probably nob less than fifty millions sterling, happily falling most on those who could manage to bear it. With our present cultivation of cereals, it is not likely that any failure of our grain crops will ever inflict on us so great a loss and inconvenience. Even if the yield be a few millions under tho average and the quality inferior, tho total loss will be far short of the sum we have named as the measure of a drought in our dairy lands. It would, however, be only tte old folly of running from one extreme into the other if we made arable merely subsidiary to pasture. The simple fact that even under our watery aud ever changing skies, as we regard them, we may suffer one of the Old World famines, and for months have the earth iron and the sky brass, warns us not to be too much of one thing—nob to carry all our eggs in one basket. —London Times.