East Anglia has for long been one of the most important centres of pig production in Great Britain, and, if the county of Suffolk is taken by itself it had, in the period between the two wars, a higher concentration of pigs than any other. It is not, however, too easy to find a satisfactory historical account of the reasons which have led to this state of affairs, though some of the possible factors could be accounted for. In view of the extent to which the pig industry in different parts of the world has now become highly specialised one has to be careful to differentiate between factors affecting quality and quantity, for high quality is not the first historical factor.

The recent war has occasioned even greater changes in agricultural production than followed World War I. Lack of man power and draught power reduced the area of cultivation : lack of fertiliser and manure reduced the yields per acre: lack of feeding stuffs reduced livestock numbers and the output of meat, milk and eggs. This was precipitated at a time in history when it was already becoming evident that, despite improvement in agricultural technique, the output of food per acre over the world was rising comparatively little.

The pre-war agricultural problem, never clearly seen until recent years, of expanding production to meet the requirements of an increasing population, has become gravely accentuated by the additional problem of agricultural recovery following the second world war.

In Scotland there is an area of nearly eleven million acres which is classed as “ Rough Grazing.” Not all of this vast acreage is suitable for the grazing of cattle, nor can the hand of man ever make it so; much is between 2,000-4,000 feet above sea-level where, by a combination of height, climate and lack of shelter, cattle do not normally range. Other parts consist mostly of rock and scree and grow such scanty herbage that even the blackface ewe visits them but occasionally. Nevertheless, there are vast areas in Scotland which can maintain large herds of breeding cows of a hardy type. As an incentive to farmers to stock such land with cattle, a yearly sum of £7 is paid for every cow kept throughout the year on this type of land. This same sum is also paid to Scottish farmers for every cow kept on what are classed as “ Upland “ farms. These farms may be said to embrace all those that are in receipt of assistance under the Marginal Production scheme. The total area of all farms so assisted during 1948 was 300,000 acres. Here then is another considerable area where the production of beef cattle should be developed to no small extent. It is a fact, however, that dairying has been, and will continue to be, one of the main operations on many of these upland or marginal farms. Some of them actually go in for the production and sale of milk, but the majority concentrate on the rearing of young dairy stock. There is a tendency for some of these farmers to turn from the dairy side of their business and develop to a greater extent the production of beef store cattle. The inducement of a yearly payment of £7 per cow is largely responsible for such a change, as no payment is made for any cows kept for the production and sale of milk, although a dairy type of animal rearing a calf or calves would be eligible.

I am not setting up to be an expert on the raising of store cattle in general and I propose now to tell you something of my own experiences from the Hill Farmers', angle and to air my favourite theory that a tremendous increase in beef production (as well as in other commodities) could come from the upland grazings of this island.

The question I asked myself ,right away, back in 1930, was would cattle live on the hills during the winter? All that I ever saw on the hills were just the local small.herds in summer on the rough grazings on what we call in Wales, Ffridd land, in Scotland, and North of England, Inbye land; enclosed by a fence or a stone wall, near the homestead.

It was withsomereluctance that Iconsented tospeakon this subject this morning for two very good reasons, the first being thatourexperimentsonthissubjectwhicharenow under way atCambridge(and which some of you at least have seen and know something of) have not yet reached the point when anything can safely be published, and the second that, apart from these experiments, I have very little to say on the subject that is new or that I can support with sufficient exact data which is not already well known to most of you.

In view of this you may very well wonder why my reluctance was overcome.The answer is simple; it was because I believe thesubject to be so important, and also because I havehad very considerable practical experience of it spread overmanyyears.

In a paper of this kind it would be very easy to be over ambitious and therefore be tempted to go too far in an effort to establish relationships between the physical and the other factors which have influenced the livestock policy of this region. Apart from the complexities of these relationships which make it difficult to determine their influence, there is generally a large gap in our knowledge of the physical data relating to livestock farming. For example it is only fairly recently that we have come to realise the subtle influence that certain “trace elements” have on the health of ruminant livestock, and also the marked differences that exist in the feeding value of grass of varied species according to the type of farming practised.

The intricate pattern of distribution of the Devon breeds of sheep can be broadly related to variations in natural conditions. Some ebb and flow in the popularity of breeds is to be expected as a result of changing economic circumstances. Pre-war, there was wide scale crossing with the Dorset Down and South Down rams to obtain earlier maturity. Since the war, the ploughing-out and the new marketing arrangements for fat-stock have brought a revival of interest in the pure-breeds, but as in other parts of Britain, the change over to dairying, especially in West and Mid-Devon, has been accompanied by a permanent reduction in sheep flocks.

In the decade up to the outbreak of World War II. in 1939, the counties of Devon and Cornwall accounted for nearly 10% of the pig population of England and Wales. It is an exporting area for all classes of livestock, but the preponderance of exports over home consumption is indicated in pigs more than any other class of livestock as the figures in Table I., based on information obtained in a survey into the movements and slaughtering of livestock in 1930, show.*

When your Secretary wrote inviting me to take part in a discussion on “ Animals and Grass,” I agreed with alacrity on account of the very keen fascination which the subject has for me. Since then, in trying to compose this paper, I realise how rash I was, and how unsuited, even after nearly twenty years’ farming, to make a useful contribution to this discussion. Because I do wish it to be clear to everyone that I, personally, have not made a success of grass farming, and therefore this paper is really an apology, or, if you will, an attempt to justify negligence, in which, I believe, I am not alone.

The first ten years of my farming life were spent on a marginal land farm, rising from eight hundred feet, and for the last ten it has been my privilege to farm what I consider to be one of the finest arable farms in Scotland. For that reason, I do feel that I have a certain claim to talk to you here to-day even if only with failures to illustrate my point.

The use of the animal as a means of evaluating pasture is an obvious approach to the problem, since this is the form in which the practical man will ultimately measure the return from his grassland. If anything has to be sacrificed it is the sward and not the animal, a point too often overlooked in our grassland work generally. Though many grazing trials of an observational nature are to be found in the early agricultural literature, the earliest experimental work was most probably that of the late Sir William Somerville. When Professor of Agriculture at Newcastle in 1897, he commenced the world-famous experiment at Cockle Park Agricultural Experimental Station on pasture improvement. An effort was then made to measure the effect of various systems of manuring in terms of the live-weight increase of sheep grazing on the different plots. In this experiment on Tree Field the relative values of the different systems of manuring were measured by weighing the sheep before and after the experimental period. In the early years the plots were stocked with hoggs, but in order to get closer grazing lambs and ewes are now used and have shown greater increases per acre.