352 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



Now, we are not only concerned today with the problem of pro- 

 ducing meat animals, but we are also concerned with the problem 

 of making the most economical use of the meat animals after we 

 have produced them, after they go to the packer and go to the con- 

 sumer. While we must consider the producing end of it, yet we 

 should also be familiar with the finished product. I have a number 

 of times made this statement, that I believe our farmers and breed- 

 ers do not know as much about the packers' business as they should ; 

 they do not know the finished product that they are preparing on 

 their farms. They know a good beef animal when they see him 

 and have him on their farm, but they have no conception of the car- 

 cass that the butcher and packer gets from the animals they sell, 

 and if there is any one particular line along which we sliould make 

 some effort to educate or enlighten our people, it is in the matter 

 of know more about the kind of carcass that the butcher or packer 

 gets from the animals which are produced on the farm. You know 

 as well as I do that when you sell a carload of steers, a carload of 

 hogs or a carload of sheep on the market, that you may not get the 

 top price, and especially so in cattle, between the top price and the 

 lower scale, ranging anywhere from $1.00 to |3.00 per hundred 

 pounds. Now, there must be a reason for it. The butcher and 

 packer buys every animal on its merit; he buys the animals on the 

 basis of what it will give him after he has taken the hide off, put 

 it in his cooler, and is ready to sell it to the retail butcher, and 

 those are some of the things that we should know something about. 

 The reason for the decrease in the number of our meat animals has 

 been stated so often that I am not going to take the time tonight 

 to dwell on that one point. 



T am going to call your attention to one thing, however, and that 

 is, when it comes to the matter of production or the matter of put- 

 ting on the market, I believe we are wasteful. We are putting upon 

 the market in too many instances animals that do not carry fat or 

 finish enough to command the best price, and they are sold at a loss 

 by the farmer. In other words, if he kept those animals and fed 

 them a little longer, he would make more money; the carcass of such 

 animal would be worth more money to the butcher and packer, and 

 besides that, we would get more pounds of meat to overcome our 

 present shortage. 



Now, there are several things which the packer considers when 

 he comes to buying a carcass. In the first place, he buys everything 

 on the basis of 100 pounds live weight; he buys on the basis of 

 quality and on the basis of dressing percentage to quite a large per 

 cent.; in other words, we find that beef cattle when slaughtered, 

 will dress from 42 per cent, to 65 per cent, to 68 per cent.; or, in 

 other words, they will give us from 42 to 68 pounds of meat for every 

 hundred pounds of live weight. Now, those cattle come in this lower 

 scale, those that dress the lower percentage are the ones that sell 

 on the low scale, so far as market price is concerned. You will 

 find that the average run of steers and heifers in good condition will 

 range 55 per cent, to 60 per cent. ; those extremely well finished, very 

 fat, run up as high as 65 per cent, to 68 per cent. That is not all. 

 An animal on foot carries a given amount of frame or bone, so that 

 the animal that dresses 42 T)er cent, on 45 per cent, or 48 per cent, 

 for every 100 pounds live weight carries just as many pounds of bone 



