From Slane, in Meath, he writes that
potatoes are a great article of culture at Kilcock, where he found them
grown for cattle; store bullocks were fed upon them, and they were even
deemed good food for horses when mixed with bran. In Slane itself, the
old custom, which was the chief cause of the famine of 1740, still
prevailed; for he says, the people there were not done taking up their
potatoes till Christmas. The potato culture, he elsewhere remarks, has
increased twenty-fold within the last twenty years, all the hogs in the
country being fattened on them. They were usually given to them
half-boiled. Wherever he went he almost invariably found the food of the
people, at least for nine months of the year, to be potatoes and milk,
excepting parts of Ulster, where they had oatbread, and sometimes flesh
meat. In the South, for the labourers of Sir Lucius O'Brien and their
families, consisting of two hundred and sixty-seven souls, the quantity
of potatoes planted, as appears from a paper given to him, was
forty-five acres and a quarter, ranging from a quarter of an acre to
four acres for each family. As to yield, the lowest he gives is forty
barrels per acre, Irish of course; and the highest reported to him was
at Castle Oliver, near Bruff, namely, one hundred and fifty barrels
(Bristol).
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