A summary of the early history


of the compound feed industry 1650 to 1850 By Paul Poornan


The modern feed industry is a fusion descended from two ancient commercial enterprises: flour milling and oilseed crushing which gave rise to provender milling and compound milling respectively. This article will focus on compound milling with respect to livestock feeding. Over the centuries oil, extracted from seeds, has been used in


the clothing industry, for soap, paint, putty, varnish, linoleum, lighting, cooking, margarine and lubrication. However, the oilseed cake was a by-product and its sole use was as a fuel source. Burning oilseed cake was not a smoke-free activity, and there is evidence (Gainsborough 1667) that town authorities would impose fines on anyone burning oilseed cake during the summer; thus, an alternative use had to be found. Oilseed cakes were known to be high in nitrogen, and therefore possibly suitable for use as fertilizer. By the early 18th


century oilseed


cakes such as linseed, rape and cotton were used as fertilizer, a practice that continued in the UK until the mid-19th


century; (and continues today


in some parts of the Third World). The circumstance of the serendipitous use of oilcakes to feed livestock is unknown, but one story relates how a farmer in Dunswell, Hull had left some scattered broken cake on his field with the intention of ploughing it into the soil, only to find that his cattle had migrated to that field to eat the cake. The cattle did not die as expected, but on the contrary, did rather well. This event must have occurred in about 1760, as in the Manchester provincial press of 1765, oil cake was ‘the present fashionable food for cattle’. A year later the price of rapeseed cake had risen from £6/tonne to £9.50/tonne ‘owing to the great demand … the best things yet discovered for the fattening of cattle’. In 1775 the government allowed rapeseed cake to be imported


from Ireland free of any duty for use as manure (fertilizer); by the 1780s rapeseed cake was routinely used as fertilizer, and linseed cake was used for feeding livestock. Demand grew so much that in 1796 the government passed an Act allowing for the free importation of both linseed and rapeseed cake from any origin. London and Hull had been the main centres of GB oilseed crushing century, mainly importing oilseeds from the Baltic,


since the mid-18th


particularly linseed and rapeseed from Russia. Hull was conveniently sited on the East coast, and also close to the new oilseed growing areas on the Fens. The number of oilseed crushing companies increased rapidly in Hull during the 19th


century, from four companies in 1826


to forty-five by 1878. This was matched by a rapid increase in the tonnage of home-produced and imported oilcakes (Figure 2). In 1856, about 150 hydraulic presses were required to work 24 hours per day to crush home-grown and imported oilseeds: of these, 100 presses were located in Hull.


Figure 2: from FML Thompson, The Second Agricultural Revolution 1815-1880, Econ Hist Rev, Vol 21, (1968).


Although feeding cattle 10-20lbs (4.5-9.0 kg) of linseed cake per


day allowed them to gain weight quickly, the carcass quality left much to be desired. A critic in 1767 complained that: ‘our [beef] are now fatted, not upon grass, as they used to be, which makes firm and wholesome flesh, but upon oil cakes, which bloats them up and creates a loose spongy fat that drips away in dressing. This meat can never be good and healthful’. One report stated that 10 stone (63.5 kg) of fat fell from one


Figure 1: Manchester Mercury 1765.


Newspaper image © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive. (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).


PAGE 26 MARCH/APRIL 2020 FEED COMPOUNDER


carcass as it was dressed. In 1798 the Smithfield Cattle Club was instituted to determine the best method of rearing cattle destined for human consumption. The general consensus was that some progress had been made in the practice of feeding cattle, but there was still room for improvement. The old system had been to feed cattle on forage and turnips. Some progressive farmers had supplemented turnips with


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