The Sources of Animal Products

01

faster our population grows the more necessary it becomes that the
people of Europe and America, like those of the Orient, learn to use
more of such foods as beans, fish, and milk. For a given amount of
food. milk needs much less farm land than beef.
SHEEP AND WOOL

Sheep are, if anything, more generous to man than cattle or swine.
They yield not only meat that is highly prized and leather that is
especially useful for shoes and bookbindings, but wool that is converted
 into clothing, hats, and blankets. Moreover, sheep can thrive
in a great variety of climates. It is not surprising, therefore, that
sheep are raised throughout the inhabited world wherever grass can
be found, or that they are the most numerous domestic animals,
aside from hens.
Sheep in the tropics. Within the tropics, however, the warmth
makes sheep become hairy, like goats, instead of woolly, and the poor
and limited supply of grass makes them lean and lanky. There the
skin is the most valuable part of a sheep, and it is not worth while to
raise them for the sake of exporting this one product.
In the temperate zones. In the temperate zones sheep are covered
with wool of good quality and are fat enough to yield large quantities
of mutton. But the same sheep rarely produces both fine wool and

UNITED ST

SHEEP AND LAME
(ON FARMS AND RANT"
NUMBER JAN. {,
EACH DOT REPRESEN
5 000 HEAD

Fig. 70. In the West, sheep are raised chiefly in the Rocky Mountain states and on semi-arid
lands. In the East, the industry tends to be concentrated in the hilly pasture sections of Ohio
and southern Michigan.