General Survey of the Sheep Industry

Extract

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.