7 MAY 1932, Page 14

ANIMAL On VEGETABLE ?

Those who study the statistics of farms are apt to divide Britain into two parts : the dairying or animal West, the grain-growing or botanical East. This very rough and some- times useful contrast appears to be a good deal further from the truth than even the specialist, or that very different animal the politician, had thought. The discovery of the error is to the credit of Cambridge University, whose students have collected figures about a thousand farms in the low-lying counties round about them. These compose the districts that have suffered most severely, and it is on behalf of their cultivators that the wheat quota has been voted. Yet it appears from the figures collected by the accurate though sympathetic statisticians of Cambridge that even in East Anglia, sometimes called the granary of England, about 68 per cent. of the income of the farms comes from animal, not botanical produce. We have never had such striking evidence of the aptitude of this island for animal husbandry.