PROCEEDINGS CORN BELT MEAT PRODUCERS' ASSN. 523 



wonderful head, and it showed the Shorthorn bull, looking at this little, 

 insignificant duke and saying, "Yes, my kind sir, if there had been as much 

 attention paid to the selection of your ancestors as there has been to 

 mine, you would be a different looking specimen." (Laughter and ap- 

 plause.) 



I don't want to take up a lot of time this afternoon telling you what a 

 good lot of fellows you are, because I thoroughly appreciate that there are 

 so many important problems pertaining to agriculture that you have not 

 tackled in the same way in which, perhaps, you will in the future. We 

 have all heard this splendid talk on the importance of feeding properly, 

 the economy of proper feeding, and in my opinion there never has been a 

 time when the farmer should pay more attention to economical feeding, 

 in economical production, even though your feeds are not worth much just 

 now. None of you people today think that you can afford to spend your 

 labor in feeding dairy cows, for instance, and milking them six hundred 

 times a year, that aren't producing more than 150 pounds of butter-fat. 

 Your labor, if you are hiring it today, is moderately high. We find that 

 true in our own farms in Wisconsin where we have to hire six or eight 

 men all the time, that we cannot afford to keep the poor-producing animal. 



You have heard something about railroad rates. Just recently one of 

 our friends at Huron, S. D., figured out the freight rates on a carload of 

 corn. He found that he could sell that carload of corn at home for $300, 

 and yet when that carload was shipped to New York City the actual cost 

 was $900, or twice as much in freight and other costs as he could get for 

 this corn at Huron. And we could go on and name many samples of the 

 same kind and you people are tackling those problems. 



Now, then, we are going to come to and are approaching another prob- 

 lem, and I believe that every live stock farmer in the state of Iowa should 

 be vitally interested in this situation, and that is the situation of co- 

 operative marketing of live stock. Now, you will pardon me this after- 

 noon if I talk more or less about the northwest or Minnesota. Your good 

 secretary of this state shippers' association has told me that you have 

 nearly 700 shipping associations. We only have in Minnesota something 

 like 500, but you know there has been a condition that has forced the sit- 

 uation of local co-operative shipping associations on the people of Minne- 

 sota and the northwest. I say a situation forced on them. Now, I want to 

 tell you it is not all forced, but we had in Minnesota an example of co-op- 

 erative marketing that, in my opinion, is hardly approachable by any 

 other co-operative marketing system, and that is the co-operative cream- 

 ery. We have 641 co-operative creameries, which are marketing the ma- 

 jority of the butterfat or the butter in Minnesota. We have compiled fig- 

 ures for the past fifteen years, and we can prove without doubt that our 

 farmers for the past fifteen years have received over 6 cents a pound for 

 their butter-fat more than the farmers in states which are controlled b)4 

 the old centralizer system. This has laid a foundation for further co- 

 operative development. This shipping association work then started. I 

 think you made your start as soon or sooner in Iowa, but you know, up in 

 the territory where there was a sparse production of live stock, the local 

 buying system was established. The farmer that ships out a half carload 



