No. 7. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 211 



lu order to show that what 1 am sa.ving is practical, I have made 

 a little investigation in the city of York. I have collected some 

 statistics from a 'number of our cattle dealers. Lewis Ahrens & 

 Co., one of the largest dealers in the city, gave me the following 

 figures from the record of their transactions during the year 1909: 

 They sold for slaughtering to the butchers of York during that year 

 2,764 cattle, 1,62.5 hogs, gathered largely from York county and 

 Maryland, and 417 shipped in from the West, making a total of 2,042 

 hogs sold by one dealer. W. A. Little & Co., another iirm, gave me 

 approximately the same number of steers and hogs sold to the 

 butchers in York. Besides this, Mr. Ahrens sold over 2,700 steers 

 as feeders to the farmers in York county, many of which were after- 

 wards bought by York butchers and slaughtered there and at least 

 some of the beef consumed in York, so that it is not by any means 

 an exaggeration to say that from 4,000 to 5,000 steers and from 4,000 

 to 6,000 hogs are consumed every year in the city of York. Very 

 few of these steers and only about half of the hogs are raised in 

 York county. 



FARMS FOR RAISING HOGS AND STEERS 



There are easily' two hundred 100-acre farms within six or seven 

 miles around York. Enough of that crude cellulose inedible by man 

 can be produced on every one of these farms to raise and prepare 

 for market 300 hogs or 24 steers every year. i>ut suppose we take 

 only 20 of these 100-acre farms and we will say that each one of the 

 20 farmers raises and puts into marketable condition 300 hogs every 

 year. But we do not want this farmer only to raise the hogs but 

 to do the manufacturing also. He slaughters and prepares for 

 market and markets them one a day every working day in the year 

 and ho sells that pork directly to the consumers. He can share 

 profits with the consumer and at the same time undersell the men 

 to whom he used to sell his products, men with their millions behind 

 them. But let us take 100 of the remaining 180 farmers in the 

 vicinity of York and have them raise and prepare 24 steers each for 

 market and do the manufacturing and marketing of 2 steers a month 

 or a total of 200 steers a month or approximately 6 steers a day for 

 the consumers of the city of York. These men can compete with 

 any combination however strong because they have eliminated the 

 cost of long distance transportation both of steer and the manu- 

 factured product and the charges of intermediaries. They raise 

 on their farms what is needed for feeding these steers, for they stop 

 plowing down green crops when they are in the most digestible and 

 eflBcient feeding condition for animals and feed them to their animals 

 and stop buying concentrated feeds and paying enormous profits 

 and transportation for these, and what is still more they use the 

 excrement of these animals when in its highest efficiency as fertility 

 and keep up the productiveness of their soil. I do not mean to 

 say that he will not need to add some one or two perhaps of the ingre- 

 dients of a fertilizer to some crops they raise, but this will be a 

 minor consideration. They are working along the line of a perma- 

 nent agriculture. The by-products of their manufacturing plant 

 they convert into poultry, eggs, beef or pork. 



