174 MISSOURI AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



have brought out repeatedly that if you can buy young animals at 

 the same price per pound and sell them for the same price per pounds 

 there is more profit in feeding young animals. 



Now, I have put a good many ifs in the above sentence and every 

 feeder must do the same when he begins to feed. If we could control 

 the market by ascertaining beforehand what you could buy and sell 

 your animals for, you could speak with some definiteness and figure 

 with some definiteness. But the principle has been demonstrated that 

 younger animals put on a gain for less grain. 



Now, if market conditions are such that you can buy and sell 

 them for the same price, the profit is in the younger animal, but our 

 experience in Missouri is that we pay from 15 to 20 per cent more per 

 pound for calves than we do for older cattle for feeders, and when we 

 go to sell them, the older cattle, as a rule, sell for a little more per 

 pound, I am willing to be corrected if that is wrong. Now, I must 

 confess that I am a little skeptical on this proposition — that these 

 results are so unusually large that there must be some special reason 

 for it. Of course I cannot tell what that reason is. The only thing- 

 I can do- is to give our actual trial here on this farm under Missouri 

 conditions and the figures that we have. We have now in progress 

 here perhaps the largest cattle feeding experiment undertaken ta 

 solve one question, and that will be continued for a longer time on 

 one particular line of work than any other single cattle feeding experi- 

 ment so far undertaken in the United States. And one of the things 

 that we are testing and making foremost In this experiment is this 

 question of the relation of age to profitable feeding. Should the Mis- 

 souri farmer feed young cattle or older cattle ? 



In the fall of 1902 we purchased 75 head of cattle and divided 

 them in the course of time into three divisions. One division was 

 wintered and put on full feed about the first of May and sold the 15th 

 of January, 1904. Another one of these divisions was put on pasture 

 alone during the season that the others were being finished, and they 

 were finished this year and sold in December last year and fed from 

 May ist to December 15th, 1904. They were of the same breeding 

 so far as we were able to secure them. They were of equal quality 

 and ability to gain and they were finished as two-year olds. The first 

 division were finished as yearlings, the second as two-year olds and^ 

 we will put on feed next May a lot of three-year olds from that original 

 draft of cattle. But we have also fed during that time another lot of 

 yearlings this year in comparison with the two-year olds. We have 

 had 5.S head of cattle on feed from May ist, 1904, until the 15th of 

 December. 



