526 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



We personally know many feeders who have been very 

 successful in handling the very best cattle and making long feeds, 

 men who keep books and know each year what they are doing. We 

 have known other feeders of good cattle who were not successful, 

 in fact money losers. Then again, we have many feeders who 

 have been very successful for many years, buying a good class of 

 feeders and making short feeds — 60, 90 or 120 days. Another class 

 of feeders who are successful are the men who buy the cheap, 

 aged feeders or the common kinds, weighing from 800 to 1,000 

 pounds, in the late fall or early winter months, making butcher 

 cattle out of them and having them ready for market during 

 March, April and May. Butcher stuff and butcher cattle are com- 

 paratively high every year during the late winter and spring 

 months, and frequently high during the month of June, but it is 

 usually not good policy to market common beef cattle later than 

 the first of June, as grass cattle from Texas and the Southwest 

 frequently commence coming during the month of June which 

 affects the market very materially for butcher cattle ; and, as a rule, 

 commoA natives are bad sellers during the summer months as 

 they come in competition with range cattle. 



It is my opinion that the greatest number of cattle feeders 

 make more money on short feeds than they do on long feeds, and 

 for years past cattle men who have wintered their cattle on blue 

 grass, stalk fields and clover hay and have given them a short feed 

 of corn during the summer months have been the ones who have 

 made the most money. Land has advanced so rapidly in the corn 

 belt the last few years and corn has been selling so exceedingly 

 high, with the shortage of stockers and feeders and at the high 

 prices they have been commanding, it has put the cattle feeder to 

 guessing whether it would pay him to continue in the cattle busi- 

 ness, but I look upon the silo as his salvation. With the silo you 

 can winter your cattle very cheap, put them on grass and corn, and 

 have them fat in 90 days, or you can feed corn with your silage 

 mixed with cottonseed or cotton cake, and have them good and fat 

 on six months' feed, and your cost of gains will be much cheaper 

 than if you fed them on corn and used hay for roughage. 



I have been asked to say something to you in regard to the 

 different kinds of feed. My own experience in feeding dates back 

 25 to 30 years, when we full fed our cattle. We depended entirely 

 on shock corn, ear or snapped corn then, and our cattle got very 

 fat if we gave them enough of it and fed them six months, but 



