CONSEQUENCES OF FOOD CONTROL.
(To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.") am in entire agreement with your article on the above subject, which I have read with particular pleasure and satisfac- tion. " The meat question is, at the moment, the one which is perhaps most exciting the public mind." Let me add, as a farmer in the beef-producing county of Aberdeen, that it is at present the question most exciting the producer's mind. The scarcity of meat is, in my opinion, very largely due to the action of the Controller fixing prices last summer on a declining scale. While cattle were selling at about 100s. per live hundredweight, we were informed that prices were fixed to fall every two months until they got to 60s. in the month of January, 1918. This Order simply stopped the production of beef. No cattle-feeder could have been expected to buy lean stores at 90s. per hundredweight knowing that by the time they were fit for slaughter as beef the price would be 60s. An ox of eight hundredweight to fatten would have cost £36 in August, and when finished in the month of January would have been eleven hundredweight, worth £33. Great encouragement here for production! When this Order came out I, like many others, decided to buy no more cattle for feeding until the December price was reached. Consequently no feeding was done during the autumn. As stock on hand got sold for beef, their stalls were left empty, with the obvious result that we have now no cattle fit to sell as beef. Had one rate been fixed for the whole autumn, the stalls, when emptied, would have been refilled, and the beef would now have been on the market.
The latest Order fixing the price of dead meat will have exactly the same effect. It will strangle, instead of encouraging, pro- duction. The price fixed is a flat rate of is. 2-1d. per pound, with no variation for difference of quality. It will therefore pay a farmer better to kill his lean cattle than to put beef on them when he is promised is. 2d. per pound for little but bones. A carcase of really good beef ought to be paid for at a higher rate than a poor one, as it will yield a larger percentage of human food. The same conditions apply to mutton. In Aberdeen this week, at the controlled prices, old Cheviot ewes with scarcely any mutton on them were making the same price per pound as the choicest hoggets in the market. None but a Government official could expect production under such conditions.—I am, Sir, &c., GEo. A. BRUCE. Inschfield, Insch.
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