528 TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 



in maintaining fifty-five speculating firms. The stoclcer and feeder de- 

 partment, then, is a part of the co-operative commission association, in 

 charge of a high class man, and if today you have a heavy run of stockers 

 and feeders at your market, what happens? The market usually dips a 

 little, doesn't it? What does Mr. Speculator do? He slips in and buys 

 a pretty good lot of stuff. The next two or three days the market may 

 improve. Of course, I don't say that it has the last couple of years up 

 until this summer, but over a long period of time it does. He makes 

 his profit all the way from nothing up to $1.50 a hundred, perhaps. Your 

 stocker and feeder department is working for you farmers, and just as 

 an example, suppose the stocker and feeder man buys some steers, he 

 is going to try and play about even when he is going to sell them. He 

 may be able to pay you farmers 10 cents a hundred more than the mar- 

 ket demands that day. Those cattle are kept or may be sold that day, 

 but probably kept and shaped up and sold to the farmer for as near cost 

 as you can figure. Now, our stocker and feeder department today owes 

 us, perhaps, around $1,000 — just lost a little bit, but it is a very easy 

 thing to try and keep it playing about even, and in that way there is a 

 great economy through a long period of time to have that stocker and 

 feeder department established, and I think you will find it is going to be 

 the big factor in the co-operative marketing plan. 



I want to say a word about one or two other problems. You know, up 

 Jhere we get not very many hogs compared to Chicago, although I know 

 we have been running second or third. Some days we have as many as 

 35 or 38 per cent of the hogs in our own alleys. We have sold as many 

 as 7,200 hogs in one day. Somebody says, "I don't see how you can 

 handle them; too many hogs for one salesman to sell." Gentlemen, I 

 am hoping for the day when at South St. Paul the Central Shipping Co- 

 cperative Association will have in their alleys 75 to 85 per cent of the 

 hogs. Nobody under God's sun can tell me that this morning thirty-five 

 hog salesmen at South St. Paul can sell 14,000 hogs to as good an advan- 

 tage as one saleman. Do you suppose that those thirty-five hog sales- 

 men, all tagging after Swift and Armour buyers, and one or two outside 

 buyers, can hold up the market as well as if the Central salesman should 

 stand there and say, "Come to me to buy your hogs"? I say that on all 

 these markets, if the time comes when the farmers can have the hogs in 

 their own hands on the nine large markets, that they will be able to 

 negotiate a whole lot better with your national organization than they 

 are today. 



Now, just a word or two. Some people say that I am sometimes a little 

 extreme. In my earlier years I was in the live stock business with my 

 father and then worked for the agricultural college at St. Paul, and 

 through those associations I assumed that a fellow would never be mo- 

 lested, and assumed that every man that you would come into competition 

 with would use good, clean business tactics; and I never assumed that the 

 same opposition, the same schoolboy tactics, could be put into effect as I 

 met since August 8 on the South St. Paul market. (Laughter.) So I sup- 

 pose it makes a fellow just express himself rather forcibly sometimes. We 

 started in — or, in fact, we hired a sheep salesman on his own request, but 



