No. 7. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTTTRB. 309 



the Spring. I was perfectly amazed when I went into some coun- 

 ties to buy cattle, and I could scarcely believe that modern farmers 

 would be guilty of practicing such methods and still would go to 

 church and claim to have common sense and self respect. 



It is a strange thing that any one in charge of animal life will 

 permit it to stand out in sheds or barns in the condition that I found 

 these cattle. You might as well feed them on fence rails, and yet 

 some of these people told me to my face that they fed these cattle 

 grain. Why, it was difficult for them to stand up, much more diffi- 

 cult for them to produce milk, covered with all kinds of dirt and 

 afflicted with disease; it is a wonder they were alive at all — yet these 

 animals were called cows. There was no possibility that any man 

 making a business of dairying could succeed under such conditions. 

 It is a perfect outrage on society that such things should be. Talk 

 about cruelty to animals; there is nothing more cruel. You can beat 

 an animal and give it a tremendous beating and it is soon over, but 

 to keep an animal standing in such condition for six months, prac- 

 tically in a state of famine and starvation, so that you can count 

 every bone in its structure, why the very condition of the animal 

 is changed, the very condition of its whole system is in such a 

 state that you take that animal and put it into a good barn and at- 

 tempt to feed it a balanced ration and you are defeated. 



I thought I had studied the balanced ration pretty thoroughly and 

 I thought that I knew pretty well how to handle an animal. I thought 

 I could take these cows and put them into a barn and commence 

 to feed them ensilage and cotton-seed meal, and that these cows 

 would respond to such treatment. But no, they would stand and 

 look at the ration as though they had never seen any think like it 

 before; they looked at it as if it was merely so much sand. 



Now what shall we do with such animals? It was a problem and 

 how did I solve it? I went to the corn crib, got nubbins and they 

 ate them greedily. Imagine Detrich standing up before a lot of 

 such cattle and going up to a corn crib for a bushel ration and get- 

 ting out nubbins for a lot of scrub cows, cows so poor that you could 

 count their ribs on each side, so thin that the wind could blow 

 through them, in fact, in a perfectly horrible condition. And yet 

 what did the people want for them? Why, they wanted the price of 

 good cattle for them. 



Look at the argument, and yet men say there is nothing in the 

 dairy business; and I agree with them. I agree that no man will 

 ever make a success out of such a dairy business! It is impossible 

 for any man to do it. Then look at the cattle; talk about a scrub 

 cow and a scrub sire; put them together and you get something still 

 more scrubby, and then they feed them this miserable feed or no 

 feed at all and call it the dairy business. No one can ever enter the 

 dairy business and flourish under such treatment as that, and that 

 is not an overdrawn statement either of what I found, and my own 

 experience this winter in buying seventy-nine head of cattle, con- 

 firmed it, whether I went into one section of the country or into 

 another, I found the cattle to be in this impoverished condition and 

 the people that owned them were complaining that farming didn't 

 pay; their grass fields showed it and their barns showed it, and they 

 themselves showed it, as additional pictures of this famished con- 

 dition of their dairy business. They never heard of r balanced ra- 



