ABSTRACT
T H E feeding of farm livestock was, from the beginnings of stock husbandry up to the nineteenth century at least, an empirical art and not a scientific practice. The stockman's eye was the sole judge of how close was the correlation between the food an animal needed and what it obtained; and it was also the only instrument by which the value of a new feed could be assessed. In the earliest days, when the husbandry of domesticated stock was in its infancy, the food provided for the ox, the sheep and the pig was very largely that which the animal ate in its natural, wild state: grass herbage, the foliage of trees and shrubs, and such fruits as acorns and beechmast. As unnatural foods were introduced-first the conserved grass and the cereals, then in classical times vetches and the by-products of the olive groves, later the cultivated legumes, the brassicae and such roots as carrots and the potato, and finally the by-products of the oil pressesthese artificial foods could only be fed to stock in the quantities which practical experience, in due time, showed to be correct. There were no external standards of judgement; and, apart from any one stockman's store of personal criteria, there was available to the livestock feeder only the accumulated experience of his neighbours and such guidance as he could obtain from the agricultural writers. It was the supreme justification of the outpourings of Arthur Young and William Marshall and the officially
sponsored county reports that they placed at the disposal of all who cared to read them precise information on the stock feeding methods of men throughout the length and breadth of the kingdom. None the less, whether the personal or the national store of knowledge were drawn upon, it was still only the individual or the collective result of observation. Such knowledge was not the worse for that: the eye of the skilful stockman is still the best of all guides to farm feeding. But there was no common standard of comparison, and no ultimate validity.
