Annual Meeting 1079 



and handled the best of all the various kinds of horses, ponies, 

 etc. 



Our future horse supply is coming entirely from you gentle- 

 men, and such as you, who produce annually your one to four or 

 five colts from the mares you work on your place. The huge 

 horse-breeding plants are a thing of the past ; they never were 

 profitable in that past. Each locality must, in the near future, 

 take care of itself or pay prices for horse-flesh as yet unheard of, 

 high as the figures of to-day appear. The West has reached a 

 point where it can itself use all the horses it can produce in the 

 near future. You should consider this the most serious of farming 

 problems. Operations begun to-day will not benefit you for the 

 next five years to any extent. You will have to work out your 

 own salvation, or in 1918, you will pay for the " farm chunks " 

 you think dear to-day at $400-$500 a pair, $70'0-$l,000 a pair, 

 and the $150 coarse, cheap " chunk " of to-day will be bringing 

 near $300. All nonsense, you think, with 23,000,000 horses in 

 the country by the last census report ? Gentlemen, of that num- 

 ber at least three-fourths are light, nondescript, worthless trash — 

 competent for no farming purpose, and a living disgrace to the 

 people who bred them. Try you ever so carefully for the best, 

 you will inevitably produce a large percentage of the mediocre, 

 and the wholly bad. 



For sixty years the farmers of America have been, via the old 

 family mare and the cross roads mongrel stud-horse, producing 

 the worst rubbish on earth (for the most part), and have been 

 satisfied with such mistaken method. The millions of hard-earned 

 eastern, southern and northern dollars that go West every 

 year for farm-horses furnish a costly commentary upon this 

 wholly vicious neglect of the very first — the elementary — 

 provision toward successful farming, the ability to find at moder- 

 ate prices, or to produce much more cheaply, able, vigorous, active, 

 good-looking heavy horses, which shall handle modern farm ma- 

 chinery, etc., competently. 



'No horse under 1,400 pounds weight has any place in modern 

 farm operations; the l,Y00-pound horse is even more appropriate 

 to the labor required and to the market. You know you want 

 him. Lamenting high prices would not help matters. Get busy ! 



