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Live Stock Breeders' Association. 235 



three years ago as eight or nine years ago, and all over 

 England we find out that the soil has maintained its fertility to a 

 marked degree because of her devotion to live stock. Everywhere 

 in England it is grass, grass. The proprietors of grass land worth 

 five or six hundred dollars per acre find that by using the proper 

 kind of stock the most profit can be made from stock, and in most 

 counties there is a severe penalty for breaking up the pasture 

 lands, so devoted have the English become to the rearing of live 

 stock. In fact, it is only in cases of emergency that this land is 

 broken, and the result is that the average of wheat throughout 

 Great Britain is forty bushels per acre. Doesn't that humble our 

 pride and check our braggadocio a little bit? The average for 

 Missouri is about thirteen bushels, and for Kansas about sixteen. 

 But if farmed properly, as we will have to do, as this country 

 grows greater and the value of property increases more and more, 

 there is no reason why we cannot do equally as well as England. 

 The time is rapidly approaching when there will be no more cheap 

 land, and we will have to increase our yield in every possible di- 

 rection. We are doing a wonderful work in this direction — your 

 professors here and everywhere are doing a wonderful work, and 

 it is all going to come into play in the vast future that is looming 

 rapidly before us. 



It is estimated that in twenty-five years we will have one hun- 

 dred and twenty million people in the United States. Just think 

 what it will be in fifty years. What will we do when we have two 

 to three hundred people per square mile in this country? There 

 is not likely to be any catastrophe to wipe out thousands of human 

 lives, and we must begin to think what we will do to enable this 

 country to maintain in comfort those people and to maintain the 

 fertility of our soil. In doing this we are serving ourselves at the 

 same time. No man need be afraid there is any scarcity of good 

 improved cattle to meet the emergency. But there are entirely 

 too many poor improved cattle, and this is the kind of cattle we 

 can not afford to breed when our population has become so thick, 

 nor can we afford to now. Discard the worthless and save the 

 good stock, and that is the lesson the Shorthorn men above all 

 others need to learn. 



We have a strange superstition that every calf that comes 

 male must be preserved for breeding purposes, while in truth there 

 are not more than two out of five that ought to be preserved. I 

 admit that in a way it is a tendency in the right direction. I ad- 

 mit there is something in the saying that "even a poor pure bred 



