400 ANNUAL, REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



little more costly, but do not make the mistake of getting anything 

 but the best. The men who have made the greatest success in the 

 livestock business are not the men who have started in with their 

 hundreds of thousands of dollars. They have gone into it slowly, 

 with the expectation of building up success. You cannot expect 

 to reach success in one year, or two, or expect it, indeed, without 

 heavy work, or even in one generation, but often only in two or three 

 generations. If I have made any success in livestock growing, I 

 attribute it largely to the fact that my grandfather started in the 

 business, and my father continued it. I am simply making use of 

 some of the things they found out. I am glad to see that the agri- 

 cultural colleges of to-day are giving their students the benefit of 

 such study as the ordinary man could not get. We find in the class- 

 room the instructor bringing together all the valuable information 

 that has been gathered by successful breeders all over the country, 

 and they can teach the young man so that he can start in where 

 the older livestock man left off. It is a wonderful thing to think of, 

 thai the young man, starting to-day, has the experience of genera 

 tions to guide him. You older men who are in the business had to 

 find things out only by your own experience, by hard knocks. But 

 the young man of to-day has not only your experience, to profit by, 

 but the experience of hundreds of other breeders, which has been 

 gathered together and put in books that he may have it. 



No^v^, I said something about studying the markets. We must also 

 study the locality; what is it; will it back you up; will it be friendly 

 to you, or not? There are always two kinds of neighbors in each 

 neighborhood, the friendly and the unfriendly kind. There is the 

 neighborhood in which nearly everybody has some kind of livestock, 

 which will, necessarily bring men from a distance. I know several 

 years ago a man near us started in the same business as mine, and 

 some of the neighbors said ''that man is going to be a rival to you 

 and take away some of your business." That man was wealthy, and 

 could succeed in business, and I knew it, but I said " my friends, he 

 will not harm me, he will help me." ''Why," they said, "how can 

 that be; he is in the same line; he has finer farm lands, and more 

 of them, and he will take away your trade." I said "time will tell." 

 Time did tell; what did it tell? When people from a distance began 

 to think of livestock, they consulted the list of breeders, they said 

 "now, here are two large breeders of horses close together. This 

 is the place to go." And they came to us, hundreds of these buyers. 

 Now, do you see the point? Now, it happens that there are not only 

 two, or four, or six, or eight breeders right in that section; now, 

 when a man who wants to buy comes to that section, he thinks "here 

 I can have the benefit of competition and selection." So they came 

 in large numbers, and instead of hurting us they help us. Why, 

 some of you remember when Washington County was a great breed- 

 ing county, how people went there, not because Benjamin McNarv 

 was there, not because there was a whole community of breeders 

 there. If you could take the Southwestern section of the State 

 you could find breeders from the Virginias there because they know 

 they would find a variety of stock there. 



Now, there is another locality that seems to me desirable, and 

 that is the locality where almost all kinds of livestock are grown. T 

 do not know whether it would be of any use to tell you of a little 



