Report of Missouri Farmers' Week. 531 



produced, whether corn, hay or grass ; in the second place, to build 

 up and maintain the fertility of the soil on which these crops are 

 produced. If we keep those two factors in view we will have the 

 entire business of cattle feeding in a nut shell. There is land in 

 nearly every section of Missouri which must be kept in permanent 

 pasture. Other lands that are being plowed and farmed today 

 would be more valuable if they were kept in permanent pasture, 

 and through a series of years they will return as much in the form 

 of feed as in the crops that they now grow. 



At the Kansas experiment station four years ago the authori- 

 ties bought 100 head of beef breeding cows — 25 Angus, 25 Here- 

 fords, 25 Galloways and 25 Shorthorns — and placed them at the 

 Hays station, where they had an, abundance of grazing land, to 

 determine the cost of producing beef cattle under western condi- 

 tions. While the conditions in. the western part of Kansas, in the 

 short-grass country, are not the same as in Missouri, the principles 

 which control the production of beef in that section are the same. 

 They bought two-year-old heifers which weighed at the time of 

 purchase 743.5 pounds, and after keeping them three years and 

 raising three crops of calves, they weighed 1,187 pounds. In other 

 words, instead of having deterioration in the value of the founda- 

 tion herd, used in the production of calves, there was an, increased 

 value due to the increased weight. When dairy cows are used 

 three years, they are not worth as much as when put into the dairy. 

 A sow that raises pigs three or four years depreciates. The aver- 

 age increase in value of these experimental cows amounted to a 

 gain of $25.89 on each one that had been purchased after producing 

 three crops of calves. 



Each individual consumed 19,533 1-3 pounds of roughage dur- 

 ing the three years. Much of this roughage consisted of corn and 

 Kafir stover, wheat straw and other by-products of grain farming 

 such as are produced in that section. These feeds have little or 

 no commercial value in years of plenty, but serve as the basis of a 

 maintenance ration for beef -breeding cows. There are thousands 

 of tons of cheap roughage going to waste in Missouri today be- 

 cause the labor of putting it into marketable form is greater than 

 its value. During that same period each individual cow consumed 

 but 270.7 pounds of grain, which gives an insight into the produc- 

 tion of feeders. That is, a man who goes into the business must 

 be on a farm that produces roughage as well as grain. In this 

 experiment there were fed 19,000 pounds of roughage as compared 



