The German government had made no economic plans for a long war. In 1914 Germany depended on imports for about a third of her foodstuffs, fodder and fertiliser, and these were affected by, among other things, the blockade put in place by the British navy from November 1914. Germany became, to a large extent, dependent on what her own farmers could produce. German agriculture was a mix of large estates in Northern Germany and some four million small farms elsewhere. As men and horses were called up, farmers’ wives took over the running of the farm, but lack of equipment, fertiliser and manpower, even though some 900,000 prisoners of war worked on the land, saw substantial falls in crop yields, which almost halved by the war’s end. A lack of fodder led to livestock losing weight, impacting on the supply of meat and milk. In July 1918 meat rations amounted to 12% of pre-war consumption.2