HC Deb 01 July 1869 vol 197 cc965-75
LORD ELCHO

said, he rose to call attention to the adulteration of feed stuffs and manures. His attention was first called to this subject by a letter he received on the 20th of March last from the Marquess of Tweeddale, the Lord Lieutenant of his county, a most eminent agriculturist, who had done more for agriculture than any other man in Scotland. That letter, referring to the greatly increased demand for artificial manures, stated that a corresponding amount of adulteration had arisen. Adulteration was carried on to a most extraordinary extent, and so artfully was it done as almost to escape notice. What he asked was not any protection that would enhance the price of agricultural produce in the market, but protection against the fraudulent practices which existed, and were daily increasing, in the manufacture of manures. Last week the Highland Society met, and the Report of the Committee stated that on no previous occasion had the number of analyses been so large, clearly proving the necessity of care in purchasing these manures. The amount of adulteration detected was small compared with what passed unchallenged. Considering it his duty to get what information he could, he had gone to the Professor of Chemistry to the Royal Agricultural Society of England, and he would state some of the results of his inquiries. Of late years one of the most important manures in this country was guano, of which there were six different descriptions. The best Peruvian sold in the Liverpool market at £13 5s., the next description was sold at £7; others fetched £6 10s., £6 15s., £9, and some sorts as low as £4 per ton. Formerly the best Peruvian contained 19 per cent of ammonia; but now it was thought first class at 16 per cent; more frequently it contained only 14½ and 15 per cent. Guano was adulterated by chalk, gypsum, and, above all, by a yellow loam found on an island in the Mersey— Liverpool being the great manufactory of the adulterated article. That Mersey loam, or yellow sand, used for the purpose of adulterating guano fetched from £1 to £1 5s., and its appearance was most deceptive. He had seen what looked like a very beautiful specimen of guano, but which contained 50 per cent of this Mersey sand; and the price of the genuine article being £12 per ton, the adulterated article was sold at £8. But that was not all. There was a kind of British guano which was absolutely worthless. This was sold at £4 and £6 per ton. It was well known that good guano contained lumps of crystallized uric acid, and these were picked out and mixed with the sand in question. The farmer, seeing these, thought he had got a splendid article, bought it, and laid it on his land; but the sand was of no kind of use whatever, and the uric acid was so strong that it destroyed the vegetation within a certain distance round each lump. Then, again, the presence of ammonia being known by a strong smell, something was put into these manures in order to create this strong smell. Thus the most knowing farmers were deceived. These adulterations could not be detected by the eye— they could only be detected by analysis. Another mode of making spurious goods pass for sound was by inventing wrong names, making up a sort of compound and calling it "Swan Island guano," or some such name, taken from a place which had no existence, and the manufacturer giving out that he was the sole consignee. He came now to bones, which in their raw state were worth £5 per ton, and when crushed from £7 to £7 10s. They were sold for £6, £7, or £8, not in their pure state, but when adulterated with 50 per cent of gypsum, worth from 14s. to £1 2s. per ton. They were further adulterated with vegetable ivory turnings from factories at Birmingham, which were sold at £2 10s. or £3 per ton, and the only value of which arose from their use in adulterating bones. Sulphate of ammonia was adulterated with sulphate of magnesia or Epsom salts. Nitrate of soda, worth £14 or £15 per ton, was adulterated with salt. There were many manufac- turers who bought nitrate of soda for purposes of adulteration, and who insisted upon the full letter of their bond —that is, that the maximum of impurity in the nitrate of soda should not exceed 5 per cent. Blood manure very often contained very little blood, and nitrogenous manures were adulterated with leather, which was utterly worthless as a manure. In Scotland he might safely say that the sum expended by farmers upon artificial manures amounted to more than half their rent. He came now to feed stuffs. The main feeding stuff ordinarily advertised was linseed cake, of which there were various descriptions. The pure contained only from 5 to 6 per cent of impurity; and the best test was to dissolve 100 grains in four ounces of water, and if the cake was pure it ought to form, when dissolved, a thick jelly. He had said that Liverpool was the head-quarters of adulterated manures, but Hull was the capital of adulterated feed stuffs. Out of the forty mills in Hull only three manufactured pure linseed cake, and, taking the whole United Kingdom, there was only one in ten which turned out the cake pure. The manufacturers sold three or four different qualities, the "pure" being charged £12; the "genuine" £11 15s.; and another description £10 10s. Pure oilcake was a fancy article, and a co-operative agricultural society had been started to supply it. When asked for at Hull it was said it did not exist. Some of these cakes were supposed to be pure, and were branded with the letter "P" to indicate that they were so; but, as he was informed by the eminent chemist to whom he had before referred, analysis showed that it contained from 20 to 40 per cent of adulteration. The best article was, as a rule, 10 per cent worse than pure. In fact, the brand of the trader was no security for the quality of linseed as a whole. Some kinds of adulteration were comparatively harmless—that is to say, they only robbed the buyer; but other kinds did positive injury to the cattle. They often contained seeds which passed uninjured through the animals, and sprouted as weeds in the fields of the farmer. Some of the materials used were castor oil, beans, cotton seed, ground nut, cocoanut, corncockle, mustard seed, purging flax, husks of rice, and acorns. Some of the samples contained 80 per cent of adulteration, and in certain cases such a quantity of mustard seed had been used, that the cake professing to be oilcake might have been broken up and used as mustard at table. He had seen in the laboratory of a doctor specimens of oilcake labelled as being part of cake that had killed Mr. So-and-so's cows, and he held in his hand a sample of cake that had killed the cows belonging to an hon. Member of that House. Another portion of cake he held in his hand was made of mere sweepings of various manufactures, and, although utterly worthless, was sold at the rate of £4 a ton. The system of adulterating the food of quadrupeds was carried to as great an extent as the system of adulterating the food of bipeds had been formerly, and therefore he thought that since Parliament had thought it right to legislate in the latter case, they should take some steps to interfere in the former case also. Doubtless he should be met by the caveat emptor argument—he should be told that the remedy he should look to was not legislation but an increased intelligence on the part of the farmer. He held, however, that it was the duty of the Government to protect people against fraud as well as against violence. It was impossible that the small farmer could bring the requisite chemical knowledge to bear upon the subject to protect himself from robbery of this description. The real question, in his opinion, was, whether or not the evil was sufficiently great to justify legislative interference. He did not know what views were entertained upon this point by the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Trade, who he was sorry not to see in his place upon that occasion; but from a remark which the right hon. Gentleman had let fall the other night when speaking to him upon the subject, he was afraid that the farmers had not much to hope from him. The right hon. Gentleman had said to him on the occasion to which he referred—"Why do you always take up the most ridiculous questions?" He mentioned the circumstance to show that the farmers who looked up to the President of the Board of Trade as their protector—almost their guardian angel— against fraud, were not likely to obtain much satisfaction at the hands of the right hon. Gentleman. The impression that prevailed among the farmers in Scotland was, that the right hon. Gentleman was extremely ignorant upon this subject, and required enlightening upon it. The right hon. Gentleman had said the other day that, if we were to go on inspecting everything, one-half the world would be inspecting the other half; but if inspection were necessary, steps should be taken to insure the establishment of a proper system, under which it could be advantageously carried out. The principle of inspection had been acted upon with reference to chicory and other adulterations of human food, and there was no reason why the same principle should not be applied to the adulteration of the food of cattle. He felt certain that the Government ought to apply a remedy. What he would suggest was the remedy of publicity— that an analysis should be made, and that the names of fraudulent tradesmen should be published at stated periods in the London Gazette, or some other publication. Something, at all events, should be done, and he moved that, in the opinion of the House, it was desirable that the attention of the Board of Trade should be directed to this subject.

MR. WELBY

seconded the Motion, because his recent investigations into this and kindred matters had convinced him that the frauds referred to by the noble Lord (Lord Elcho) were of enormous extent, and deserved the most serious consideration of the Government and Parliament; but he confessed to having serious doubts whether any special legislation on them was practicable. Of these two branches of adulteration that of feeding stuffs was probably the most important, for by it our supply of beef and mutton was directly affected. The loss caused by the use of adulterated cake had been variously estimated at from one-quarter to half of the produce—that was to say, that to feed an animal to a given stage of ripeness took from a quarter to half as long again, and, therefore, cost from a quarter to half as much again more money with the adulterated cake sold as it would do with pure. But there were two great difficulties in the way of dealing with this—one which had been clearly pointed out by the Lord Chief Baron, in 1862, in the cause which led to the formation of the Driffield Company— that the production of oilcake is not the primary object of the seed-crusher. His original trade was to express oil, worth £30 or £40 per ton; and the cake, valuable as it was, was really only the refuse of his manufacture. He was not in any way bound, like those who sell food for man, to see that what he sells is wholesome; the purchaser must look to that; and, as it happened that the interest of the seed-crusher and the cake consumer were not altogether identical—for the purest linseed did not give the most oil—you could scarcely punish the crusher for not selling that which he did not aim or profess to produce. But whether he should not be punished for professing to sell as pure that which was not so, was another question. On that the second difficulty arose, that in the adulteration of vegetable matters chemical analysis gave little or no assistance. Professor Voelcker said it would be easy to concoct a cake, without a particle of linseed in it, which should give the same chemical results as one made of pure linseed. The consequence of all this to the farmer was most serious. The crusher had learnt that his refuse was a marketable and valuable article, and he made it an important, though subordinable branch of his trade. And how did he carry on that branch? He sheltered himself under the peculiarities of his position, and as already stated by the noble Lord, scarcely 10 per cent of the oil mills in England turned out a pure article. Many cakes contained no linseed at all; many were adulterated with poisonous materials, as castor oil beans, croton oil beans, and curcas beans. Not long ago, Professor Voelcker produced a sample of rape-cake, mixed with wild mustard, which had killed three oxen; and another composed of "the sweepings" of an oil mill and the warehouse of a general provision dealer, a very little of which in two days had killed fourteen sheep, three horses, and a pony. Special machinery had been invented for the close imitation of linseed cake; rice dust, pollard, oat dust, &c, were made into "buff-em," which had been wittily described to be to cake what "bunkum" is to speech. Other stuffs were similarly adulterated. Rico meal had been made of rice husks and chalk. Another, Dr. Voelcker had described as of no more value than a mixture of saw dust and ground flints. In 1863 Dr. Voeleker gave a lecture on this subject, which produced a good effect for a time, but that gradually wore off, and now, owing to the demand produced by the failure of green crops last year, the adulteration was worse than ever. But the best remedy appeared to him (Mr. Welby) to be the establishment of oil mills on co-operative or limited liability principles, whose first object should be the making of pure cake, leaving the production of oil merely subsidiary. This had been done with great success at Driffield in Yorkshire. So again with manures, legislation would be difficult. It was not easy to define artificial manure, as some farmers liked it mixed with soot, gypsum, &c, and the adulteration was not easily discoverable at the time. Many a man went on wondering for a long time at the smallness of his crops from fields on which he had laid out large sums in manure; and when at last the true cause dawned upon him, the proofs of his having been cheated had vanished into the soil and the air, and he had no hope of redress. His case was a very hard one. Suppose, for instance, he bought guano, no ocular inspection, however careful, could tell whether guano was adulterated or not; but chemical analysis could. He turned to that, and the ingenuity of his persecutors converted it into a fresh instrument of torture for him. The dealers had found out that he had begun to attach belief to analysis; so they themselves sent a capital sample to be analyzed, ostentatiously published the analysis, and then adulterated the bulk which is bought on the strength of it with loam, salt, sand, &c. Or suppose he bought phosphatic manures, their value depended mainly on the percentage of soluble phosphate, or phosphoric acid in a soluble form that they contained, for in that shape they were most readily taken up by the plants. Each unit of this per cent was really worth about 3s. 6d.; so that for these manures to be worth anything like what they were sold at, they ought to contain 30 or 40 per cent of soluble phosphate. Well, what were the facts? Samples analyzed for the Kendal Farmers' Club contained, instead of 44 per cent, which they should have done at their average price of £7 14s., less than 20 per cent. He spoke with some confidence on this point, because much attention had lately been directed to it in South Lincolnshire; and there one sample lately analyzed contained 6 per cent of phosphates, 54 per cent of sand, and the rest water. Of eleven other samples, at an average price of £6 8s. per ton, five contained only 12 per cent, or less; one contained only 2 per cent; and was worth, therefore, about 7 s., its price being £6; and one at £6 contained no soluble phosphate at all. The fraudulent dealers' excuse for all this was—"The farmers, in their ignorance, won't give above a certain price; we must concoct an article which we can sell them at that price, or not sell at all." There was considerable force in that argument, but the joke might be carried too far. It had been so in South Lincolnshire; for there the farmers, disgusted with the result of their inquiries, had formed themselves into an association to buy their manures direct from the manufacturers, in large quantities, with a guarantee of their quality, and to analyze them. The result had been that the members had already saved a large sum, equal to the whole of their poor rate, and they were extending so widely that their next order would be for from 10,000 to 15,000 tons. This appeared to him to be the true direction in which to look for a remedy for the evil; but though he had these doubts as to the possibility of effectual legislation, if an effectual law could be devised to assist the farmers in their efforts to protect themselves, he would hail it most cordially. In Maine a law came into operation on that very day providing that every bag or barrel of manure should bear a label, giving the maker's name, his place of business, and the percentage of phosphates and ammonia that it contained. If it did not come up to the description, the dealer might be punished. Something like this might eventually be practicable. Like the noble Lord he was not sanguine enough to expect much assistance from the President of the Board of Trade, for he had plainly intimated that he thought legislation on these matters impolitic, discussion unprofitable, and agriculture so flourishing, as to stand in no need of legislative assistance. "With all due submission, he thought the right hon. Gentleman was wrong on all three points. The first two were matters of opinion, but the last was one of fact; and he would venture to say, from a somewhat long and extensive acquaintance with them, that the farmers were by no means so prosperous as the President of the Board of Trade thought. Too many of them earned their livelihood from hand to mouth; at the best of times their margin of profit was always narrow, and the bad season last year had, in many instances, touched seriously on their capital. He would undertake to say, in their name, that they would be deeply grateful for any effort which Parliament in its wisdom might think fit to make to protect them from the rapacity of those insatiable harpies, adulteration and fraud.

Amendment proposed, To leave out from the word "That" to the end of the Question, in order to add the words "in the opinion of this House, it is desirable that the attention of the Board of Trade should be directed to the adulteration of feed stuffs and manures,"—(Lord Elcho,) —instead thereof.

MR. M'LAGAN

said, he thought a great deal of what was complained of could be traced to the fact that, notwithstanding the warnings which had been put forth by the various agricultural societies, farmers were willing to accept any compound that was offered to them as a new manure by unprincipled adulterators. He thought that the farmers, to a great extent, held the remedy in their own hands. Let them refuse to purchase from any manufacturer who would not give them a guaranteed analysis. This plan had been adopted in Scotland; the farmers forming themselves into local associations, and appointing chemical inspectors, and after two years, in a district where adulteration had been carried on to an immense extent, there was not found one single article of adulterated manure. He thought the adulteration of oil cake was due, in a great measure, to the fact that farmers preferred to give a much higher price for home-made cake than for foreign cake, some of which, and that from America in particular, was far superior to what was sold as home-made cake. Formerly the millers threw their oat-husks into the rivers. The husks were afterwards bought up at a high price, and ground up and mixed with other materials. Farmers must learn to exercise more caution. Oleaginous seeds could not be distinguished by the chemist; in these cases microscopical observation was necessary. In his opinion the farmer should be treated as other traders were, and if other traders did not ask for protection he did not see why the farmer should. He spoke boldly on this point because he belonged to the agricultural interest.

MR. SHAW LEFEVRE

said, that two hon. Members who had spoken before him, while admitting the evils that existed, and also the difficulty of legislation, had admitted likewise that the true remedy was in the hands of the farmer himself. He was glad that this discussion had come on so soon after the debate on the adulteration of seeds, because it was possible that the Committee to which the Adulteration of Seeds Bill had been referred might be able to devise a remedy applicable to the present case also. But there was another Bill before the House upon a much larger question—namely, the adulteration of the food of the people, and it would be impossible to deal with so small a subject as feed stuffs and manures while the far more important question touching the food of the people was concerned was still undecided. The noble Lord (Lord Elcho) had said that the small farmers were unable to protect themselves, but the information he (Mr. Shaw Lefevre) had received pointed to an opposite conclusion. He had received a letter from a gentleman of great experience within the last few days, pointing out that in various districts of Scotland the farmers were sufficiently protected from these frauds by combining and forming associations among themselves. One instance was given of a district in which in the beginning much bad seed was sold; but the members of the association ceased to purchase from those who sold bad articles, and one by one the inferior vendors were weeded out. That would show that the farmers had the means of protecting themselves, and even of stamping adulteration out of a district. The farmers, by co-operation, having chemists attached to their associations, and by purchasing on a guaranteed analysis, had an easy method of meeting the evils complained of. Let it be known that there was an analytical association within the district, and adulteration would cease.

MR. READ

said, the adulteration of manures and feeding stuffs was a great and crying evil, beyond the means of detection of small farmers, and therefore it was the duty of the Government to provide a remedy. He did not fancy that the question was ripe for legislation, but he held that the whole matter of adulteration and of fraud should be inquired into, and he hoped in a short time they would have a Commission to investigate the subject. As to farmers having their protection in their own hands, so had other people, and yet the Government stepped in to protect them; for instance, persons who seat diseased meat to market were liable to fine and imprisonment, and in the city of Norwich last year a farmer who sent fifty quarters of old and dirty wheat to a mill to have it cleansed, had that wheat seized and, burnt in the public market. Their great national agricultural societies ought to help farmers by taking the risk of actions from publishing the names of fraudulent vendors of manures and feeding stuffs.

MR. NORWOOD

said, he believed that farmers would be able to obtain plenty of pure oilcake if they would pay a fair price for it.

Question, "That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the Question," put, and agreed to.

Question again proposed, "That Mr. Speaker do now leave the Chair."