In 1937-38, the total value of the agricultural output in Great Britain, excluding subsidies on cattle and wheat, was roughly £265,000,000 sterling. Of this total, livestock and livestock products accounted for £187,000,000—or just over 70 per cent. The total value of mutton, lamb and wool sold off the farms in the same year was a little more than £24,000,000—about 9 per cent, of the total, and only about 13 per cent, of the output from all forms of meat and livestock products. The question may, therefore, well be asked—why we propose to devote the whole of the second meeting of the newly-formed Society of Animal Production to discussion of an animal which would appear to a pure economist to be of rather minor importance in British Agriculture. Before the war, pigs and poultry each brought in a substantially greater return, and—if we exclude the mountainous regions of Scotland and Wales—both pigs and poultry leave sheep well behind as a source of gross income.

The reports which appeared last January from the English and Scottish Hill Sheep Farming Committees have shown that the economic utilization of our extensive areas* of high lying land has thrown up a number of closely inter-related problems, some technical, some administrative, others legal, social, or political. I have to select from this complexity those aspects of the hill sheep industry which most properly fall within the scope of the Society’s interests and which can be presented within the space of half an hour. It is not easy.

Great changes have been brought about in British farming by the war. Of these changes the most obvious as well as the most important have been, firstly, the conversion of large areas of grassland into arable to grow much needed human food crops, and secondly, the decline that has taken place in the numbers of all classes of farm livestock other than dairy cattle.

There are now welcome signs that the European war may soon be brought to a successful conclusion and the time is appropriate, therefore, for taking stock of British farming as a whole as well as of its component parts, in order to decide what developments are necessary to bring farming in this country into a sound and healthy state, so that it may yield its full profit to farmers themselves and to the nation as a whole.

The management of an arable flock is more complex than that of any other livestock enterprise : it involves a more intimate crop-livestock association than exists in any other farming system, and to some extent the great decline in arable sheepfarming that has taken place during the past fifty years is due to the fact that it is a difficult way of farming ; there are of course, other reasons why the decline in arable sheep farming has taken place and I propose to deal with these very briefly.

I feel it is first necessary to point out that agricultural scientists and research workers have contributed practically nothing that would benefit the arable flock owner. Since the days of the late Professor Wrightson no eminent agriculturist has shown any interest in the fortunes of the arable sheep farmer, with the exception of the late Sir Daniel Hall, who once wrote an account of an ill-fated flock of Hampshire Downs kept on unsuitable land in Hampshire.

Observations on the normal season were made over several years with a small flock of Suffolk X Border Leicester-Cheviot ewes backcrossed with Suffolk rams. The flock was under grassland management ; rams were kept in the whole year round, the fertile ram being usually replaced in the breeding season by a sterile ochred ram. The lambs were left with the ewes until they had ceased to suck.

Two ewes have lambed at a time corresponding to service at the end of July or beginning of August ; but the normal season, on the average, extended from mid-September to mid-March, the extremes being the end of August to early April. Ewes suckling lambs born later than July showed slight delay in onset of the breeding season. After lambing in November the interval to the next heat may be as little as three weeks. If ewes are put to the ram at the beginning of the season, so as to lamb down in early February, about half will come on heat again before the end of the season.

To show the importance of the level at which the pregnant ewe is fed in relation to :

• (1)The birth weight of her offspring,

• (2)The volume of milk which she produces during her lactation period,

• (3)The influence of these two upon the rate of growth of the lambs,

two experiments were carried out. In the first, a group of 4-year-old Border Leicester × Cheviot ewes from the same flock were mated to the same Suffolk ram. They were then split into two uniform groups. The ewes were fed individually and after service both lots were fed just sufficient sainfoin hay to keep them at constant body weight. Then, six weeks before lambing, the members of one group were given ½ lb. of concentrate daily and as much hay as they would eat. Upon this ration these ewes gained an average of 44 lb. At the same time the amount of hay fed to the second group was reduced so that over the last six weeks these ewes lost on the average 11 lb. weight.

In 1941 a flock of Romney sheep was made available for work on fertility and wool growth. This flock has been kept at the Animal Research Station at Cambridge. The marked seasonal variations in the quality and quantity of wool produced must therefore be considered in relation to the climatic conditions around Cambridge.

It has been found that the weight of wool and the length and diameter of the fibres change markedly with season. Wool growth is always poor in the winter and good in the summer. The question immediately arises as to whether such marked seasonal variation is due to bad nutrition, particularly in the winter.

The general story of the studies I am to describe is that of the tragedy of an Australian drought. The details are those of part of a series of investigations on the vegetation of the pastoral areas and its uses. I believe they may be ‘of some interest to members of the Society and the Institute, as observations on sheep behaviour played a most important part in giving us a practical solution in one locality to the main problem of saving some of the drought-stricken stocks. I should like to mention here the valuable work of G. F. Melville who carried out most of the field observations under great difficulties, and F. Lefroy, manager of Boolardy Station. First, the general picture.

The paper as presented consisted of extracts from “Grazing management practices and their relationship to the behaviour and grazing habits of cattle ”, by D. B. Johnstone-Wallace and Keith Kennedy, Department of Agrostology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, which appears in the Journal of Agricultural Science, Vol. 34, Part 4, October 1944. The following excerpts are published by permission of the editors of the Journal of Agricultural Science.

As a result of experiments and observations made on the field at Cornell University between 1931 and 1939, a more distinct study of grazing management problems was commenced, the results of which to date are discussed in this paper.

Experiments in Denmark and America and studies in this country have shown that the law of diminishing returns applies to the complex relationship between the food intake of the cow and her milk yield, that is, as the food intake of the cow increases, milk yield increases but at a constantly declining rate, so that a higher level of feeding produces a greater additional quantity of milk when the plane of nutrition of the cow is already low. The optimal level of feeding dairy cows for profit cannot therefore be fixed for it must vary with both the cost of the cow’s food and the selling price of milk.

During the year of my presidency of the Comparative Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, a continuous theme was selected for discussion, leading up, through the subjects which constituted the most rational means of appreciating its meaning and scope, to the culminating one, namely, that of Comparative Psychology and Animal Behaviour. Without such rational approach it would have been impossible, to my mind, for anyone not conversant with the immense and confusing literature that is now accumulating on the subject to grasp the transcending importance of animal behaviour study as a subject calling out for immediate exploitation, particularly by veterinary workers.