202 i Missouri Agricultural Report. 



Manifestly, in comparing the cost of beef production with the 

 cost of pork production, it would not be fair to compare a steer 

 three years old with a pig weighing fifty pounds, fed on a mixed 

 or balanced ration, while the steer has not been so fed; and on 

 the other hand, it would not be fair to compare a calf fed on a well 

 balanced ration to a hog fed on corn alone; and in order to make 

 this comparison more accurate, we selected all the feeding experi- 

 ments we could find that had to do with feeding corn to cattle — 

 mostly two-year-old cattle — and we took the experiments of the 

 Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, Iowa and other experiment stations 

 that have ever fed corn as a sole grain ration to cattle, hogs and 

 sheep, and as a result of the average of all those experiments con- 

 cerned with feeding corn to cattle, hogs and sheep, we found these 

 facts: It required on an average 1,080 pounds of corn to make 

 100 pounds of gain, in the case of cattle, and 457 pounds of hay fed 

 with the grain. The kind of hay fed was variable. In some experi- 

 ments clover hay was used, and in some timonthy and in some trials 

 other roughages. In the case of hogs fed on corn alone, we found 

 the average amount of feed per one hundred pounds of gain was 500 

 pounds. In the case of sheep, there are included the experiments 

 conducted at the Michigan Station, the Wisconsin Station, the Min- 

 nesota and other stations — six or eight different stations in all — and 

 in these experiments it required 420 pounds of corn to make 100 

 pounds of gain with 458 pounds of hay. In other words, it required 

 the same amount of hay as with cattle, but it required only one-half 

 as much corn to make a pound of pork or mutton as to make a 

 pound of beef. 



But we did not stop with corn alone. We compared the same 

 class of animals fed on oats, barley and on varied rations, mostly 

 balanced rations, with the addition of roots and silage, and on 

 balanced rations without the addition of roots and silage. We found 

 oats were used only for fattening hogs and sheep, and it required 

 421 pounds of oats where they had been fed. When barley was 

 fed to two-year-old cattle 914 pounds were required to produce 100 

 pounds of gain. Barley fed to sheep required 305 pounds of grain 

 feed per 100 pounds gain. There were three or four experiments 

 only in feeding barley to sheep. 



In feeding peas, we were able to find only one Canadian ex- 

 periment, which shows that it required 452 pounds of peas to make 

 100 pounds of pork, and 549 pounds to make 100 pounds of mut- 

 ton. But this experiment with sheep in connection with grazing 

 the peas was on the ground, and this comparison is not, therefore, 



