Farmers' Week in Agricultural College. 169 



,out and let the other fellow feed. I want to say to you that if yon are 

 so situated that you can handle one, two or three loads of cattle a year 

 I would advise you to continue in the business year after year, and in 

 the end I think you will have a reasonable profit on the business enter- 

 prise, and that is all we have a right to expect. There never was a time 

 when business men were doing business on as small a margin as today. 

 Large corporations are doing ])usiness on small margins. You say they 

 are getting enormously rich — and that is true — but it is on the volume of 

 business they do. Competition is close in nearly all lines and the per 

 cent of profit is small, and for that reason 1 say feeders must expect m 

 the future, as they have in the past, to do 1)usiness on a small margin. 



There are three interests that have a right to share a profit in this 

 beef production; that is, the man who owns the cow that produces the 

 calf, the man who carries the calf up to the time it is ready to go in th;^ 

 feed lot, and the feeder that finishes and markets this steer, whether it 

 be three months, six months or a year. We all agree that each party 

 has a right to share a profit if there is one, but we all know that condi- 

 tions during the last few years have been such that feeders have had to 

 pay very high prices for their feeding cattle, and while the prices paid 

 have been satisfactory to the grower, they have often been too high for 

 the feeder to handle at a profit. On the other hand, if the feeder buys 

 his steers from the grower at a price worth the money and will make a 

 satisfactory profit to the feeder, the grower has often produced the steers 

 at a loss; so that if every interest realizes a profit we all see that the 

 profit to each interest must be small indeed. You ask for the solution, 

 and I would say this : That just so far as it is practical and profital^le 

 let every feeder be the breeder and grower of his cattle. There are a 

 great many farms today that are almost barren. of cattle, where there 

 could be a few cows kept every year and calves produced at a profit. 

 Kansas City is the greatest feeder cattle market in the world. But did 

 you ever consider how far on an average these stock and feeding cattle 

 were shipped from their breeding ground to reach the Kansas City 

 market. I had in the feed lot last summer, and showed the cattle at the 

 International at Chicago, a load of cattle bought in Nevada last Janu- 

 ary. They were six days getting to Denver and five days from Denver 

 home — 1,800 miles. A neighbor of mine had 100 cattle on feed, bred in 

 Idaho, and the question of the future supply of feeding cattle, even if 

 we are willing to go the distance, is one that must interest every feeder. 

 There is no question in my mind but what in the next year or two there 

 is going to be a noticeable shortage in cattle. About three months ago 

 I spent a couple of weeks in Texas. From my observation and the in- 



