It may be said, of course, that this opinion strangely contrasts with the well-known superiority of British agriculture. Do we not know, indeed, that British crops average twenty-eight to thirty bushels of wheat per acre, while in France they reach only from seventeen to twenty bushels? Does it not stand in all almanacs that Britain gets every year £200,000,000 sterling worth of animal produce—milk, cheese, meat and wool—from her fields? All that is true, and there is no doubt that in many respects British agriculture is superior to that of many other nations. As regards obtaining the greatest amount of produce with the least amount of labour, Britain undoubtedly took the lead until she was superseded by America in the Bonanza farms (now disappeared or rapidly disappearing). Again, as regards the fine breeds of cattle, the splendid state of the meadows and the results obtained in separate farms, there is much to be learned from Britain. But a closer acquaintance with British agriculture as a whole discloses many features of inferiority.
However splendid, a meadow remains a meadow, much inferior in productivity to a corn-field; and the fine breeds of cattle appear to be poor creatures as long as each ox requires three acres of land to be fed upon. As regards the crops, certainly one may indulge in some admiration at the average twenty-eight or thirty bushels grown in this country; but when we learn that only 1,600,000 to 1,900,000 acres out of the cultivable 33,000,000 bear such crops, we are quite disappointed. Anyone could obtain like results if he were to put all his manure into one-twentieth part of the area which he possesses. Again, the twenty-eight to thirty bushels no longer appear to us so satisfactory when we learn that without any manuring, merely by means of a good culture, they have obtained at Rothamstead an average of 14 bushels per acre from the same plot of land for forty consecutive years;[45] while Mr. Prout, in his farm near Sawbridgeworth (Herts), on a cold heavy clay, has obtained since 1861 crops of from thirty to thirty-eight bushels of wheat, year after year, without any farm manure at all, by good steam ploughing and artificial manure only. (R. Haggard, I. 528.) Under the allotment system the crops reach forty bushels. In some farms they occasionally attain even fifty and fifty-seven bushels per acre.
Fig. 1.—Proportion of the cultivated area which is given to cereals altogether, and to wheat, in Great Britain and Ireland.
If we intend to have a correct appreciation of British agriculture, we must not base it upon what is obtained on a few selected and well-manured plots; we must inquire what is done with the territory, taken as a whole.[46] Now, out of each 1,000 acres of the aggregate territory of England, Wales and Scotland, 435 acres are left under wood, coppice, heath, buildings, and so on. We need not find fault with that division, because it depends very much upon natural causes. In France and Belgium one-third of the territory is in like manner also treated as uncultivable, although portions of it are continually reclaimed and brought under culture. But, leaving aside the “uncultivable” portion, let us see what is done with the 565 acres out of 1,000 of the “cultivable” part (32,145,930 acres in Great Britain in 1910). First of all, it is divided into two parts, and one of them, the largest—308 acres out of 1,000—is left under “permanent pasture,” that is, in most cases it is entirely uncultivated. Very little hay is obtained from it,[47] and some cattle are grazed upon it. More than one-half of the cultivable area is thus left without cultivation, and only 257 acres out of each 1,000 acres are under culture. Out of these last, 124 acres are under corn crops, twenty-one acres under potatoes, fifty-three acres under green crops, and seventy-three acres under clover fields and grasses under rotation. And finally, out of the 124 acres given to corn crops, the best thirty-three, and some years only twenty-five acres (one-fortieth part of the territory, one-twenty-third of the cultivable area), are picked out and sown with wheat. They are well cultivated, well manured, and upon them an average of from twenty-eight to thirty bushels to the acre is obtained; and upon these twenty-five or thirty acres out of 1,000 the world superiority of British agriculture is based.
The net result of all that is, that on nearly 33,000,000 acres of cultivable land the food is grown for one-third part only of the population (more than two-thirds of the food it consumes is imported), and we may say accordingly that, although nearly two-thirds of the territory is cultivable, British agriculture provides home-grown food for each 125 or 135 inhabitants only per square mile (out of 466). In other words, nearly three acres of the cultivable area are required to grow the food for each person. Let us then see what is done with the land in France and Belgium.
Now, if we simply compare the average thirty bushels per acre of wheat in Great Britain with the average nineteen to twenty bushels grown in France within the last ten years, the comparison is all in favour of these islands; but such averages are of little value because the two systems of agriculture are totally different in the two countries. The Frenchman also has his picked and heavily manured “twenty-five to thirty acres” in the north of France and in Ile-de-France, and from these picked acres he obtains average crops ranging from thirty to thirty-three bushels.[48] However, he sows with wheat, not only the best picked out acres, but also such fields on the Central Plateau and in Southern France as hardly yield ten, eight and even six bushels to the acre, without irrigation; and these low crops reduce the average for the whole country.
The Frenchman cultivates much that is left here under permanent pasture—and this is what is described as his “inferiority” in agriculture. In fact, although the proportion between what we have named the “cultivable area” and the total territory is very much the same in France as it is in Great Britain (624 acres out of each 1,000 acres of the territory), the area under wheat crops is nearly six times as great, in proportion, as what it is in Great Britain (182 acres instead of twenty-five or thirty, out of each 1,000 acres): the corn crops altogether cover nearly two-fifths of the cultivable area (375 acres out of 1000), and large areas are given besides to green crops, industrial crops, vine, fruit and vegetables.