[52] _Annuaire Statistique de la Belgique pour_ 1910, Bruxelles, 1911. In Mr. Seebohm Rowntree’s admirable work, _Land and Labour: Lessons from Belgium_, published 1910 (London, Macmillan), the reader will find all concerning Belgian agriculture dealt with in detail on the basis of the author’s personal scrupulous inquiries on the spot, and all available statistical information. [53] _Land and Labour: Lessons from Belgium_, pp. 178, 179. [54] Taking all horses, cattle and sheep in both countries, and reckoning eight sheep as equivalent to one head of horned cattle, we find that Belgium has _twenty-four_ cattle units and horses upon each 100 acres of territory, as against _twenty_ same units and horses in Great Britain. If we take cattle alone, the disproportion is much greater, as we find _thirty-six_ cattle units on each 100 acres of cultivable area, as against _nineteen_ in Great Britain. The annual value of animal produce in Belgium is estimated by the _Annuaire Statistique de la Belgique_ (1910, p. 302) at £66,040,000, including milk (£4,000,000), poultry (£1,600,000), and eggs (£1,400,000). [55] I take these lines from a letter which the Rural Office of the Belgian Ministry of Agriculture had been kind enough to write to me on January 28, 1910, in reply to some questions which I had addressed to that Office in order to explain the striking oscillations of the Belgian exports between the years 1870 and 1880. A Belgian friend, having kindly taken new information upon this point, had the same opinion confirmed from another official source. [56] If we take the figures of imports and exports, which I also owe to the Belgian Rural Office, we find that the _net_ imports of wheat, rye, and wheat mixed with rye (_méteil_) reached 3,011 million lb. in 1907 (3,374 million in 1910), which would give 429 lb. _per capita_ for a population of 7,000,000 inhabitants. But if this amount be added to the local production of the same cereals, which reached the same year 2,426 million lb., we arrive at the figure of 776 lb. per head of population. But such a figure is much too high, because the annual _per capita_ consumption _of both the winter and the spring cereals_ is generally estimated to be 502 lb. There must be, therefore, either an error in the weight of the imports, which is improbable, or the figures of re-exported cereals are not complete. Let me add that in France the average annual consumption _per capita_ of _all_ cereals, including oats, has been in the course of twenty-nine years (1880-1908) 525 lb., which confirms the above-mentioned figure. And in France people eat as much bread as in Belgium. [57] See Appendix K. [58] Assuming that 9,000 lb. of dry hay are necessary for keeping one head of horned cattle every year, the following figures (taken from Toubeau’s _Répartition métrique des impôts_) will show what we obtain now under usual and under intensive culture:--