FOOD FOR THE FUTURE

Shannon News, 17 August 1928, Page 4

FOOD FOR THE FUTURE

Roast galloyok, buffalox steak, cattalo hash, and-eland" milk, with other curious provided by newly invented farmyard animals, promise to figure largely in our meals during the course *of a few. decades, when the sheep and cattle of to-day, economists assert, will have become extinct in an over-populated world. In sheep "alone the world is already short of 100,000,000 head; it Js short of double that number of beef-cattle and nearly treble that number of milchcattle, to meet present demands. The meat-eating population of Great Britain alone is twice what it was a century ago, and with a corresponding world increase . some economists predict that mankind must face a future world meat-famine and choose between compulsory vegetarianism or the creation of vast herds of new meat and milk yielding animals. By then the demand for grain, fruit and vegetables will make it impossible to raise live stock on. land which would bear crops. The great wastes of Arctic scrub and tropical bush and desert are visualised as the future ranching areas of the world, and already scientific stock-ranchers are evolving new. breeds of animals to meet these changed conditions.

An American hunter-rancher is experimenting with the buffalox in Rhodesia. He aims to cross the wild African buffalo with the Hereford cow and bull, evolving a hybrid animal immune from tick disease, East Coast fever, and other cattle scourges. Haunting the swamps and scrub of Africa's wastes, the wild buffalo also resists the attacks of the deadly tsetsefty, whose bite is fatal to cattle, while it can also resist the rigours of drought and the '.'big rains." It grows on scrub and rank vegetation unsuitable for domestic beasts. If the new hybrid buffalox can be induced to inherit these valuable traits of its wild parent, immense tracts of Africa, unsuitable for crop farming and cattle-ranching, would become valuable grazing for future herds. Success has attended similar experiments in Alberta in crossing the American buffalo with cattle, and a new beef and dairy beast, the cattalo, has been evolved. It yields a fine quality beef and a valuable hide with thick curly lustrous hair in great demand by certain sections of the clothing trade. The cattle can forage on the scrub of the snowbound north where no cow or bullock could survive. The galloyak, a not-quite-so-new beast, a cross between the Tibetan yak and the Galloway cow, yields excellent meat, abundant milk, valuable leather, and a big hair crop. It also can forage in the Arctic wastes and on the scrub of mountains. In East Africa importnat experi- s