Farmed: Selling Animal Products

Abstract

There was little change to British farming practices between 1914 and 1916. As war broke out, the government’s main concern was that there should be a large enough labour force available to ensure that crops could be harvested. Official guidance offered to farmers by the Agricultural Consultative Committee was limited to recommendations that wheat production should be increased and the numbers of livestock maintained. In the first two years of the war, the number of dairy cows stayed reasonably consistent at around 2.2 million whilst the overall size of the national cattle population increased to 7.44 million and the sheep population during the same time remained at around 25 million.¹ Increases in the cattle population reflected the choices that farmers made to maintain the numbers of cows in preference to sheep or pigs when, in 1915, feed shortages began to affect livestock farming. Sheep and pigs represented a much smaller capital investment than cattle, and cows also offered the advantage of milk as a constant income stream. The costs of rebuilding a national cattle herd were considered too high; sheep and pigs were thus more ‘expendable’ and as a result, by 1916, the numbers of pigs had decreased by 7 per cent (Dewey, 1989, p. 82).