TWENTIETH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III 211 



year than you take out in raising a crop. You cannot send a 

 thousand circulars or a thousand lectures to the county, and you 

 cannot tell him how to stop it, but you can put on a little demonstra- 

 tion at your county fair and show him how to stop it and make a suc- 

 cess to it. You have all been urged to build silos, and a silo is a 

 wonderful thing, there's no question about it. One of the first things 

 they told you was to put it in awfully green, and then they told you 

 to put it in pretty nearly ripe, and now they say that the riper the 

 corn is the better silage it makes. We all know that the silo loses 

 one-third of the feeding value of the kernels of corn that go in 

 there, and I wonder why they can't still be filled with the stalk and 

 the corn saved ? Why aren't those things solved at the county fairs ? 

 If you put on that kind of thing you will be building up the educa- 

 tional value of your fairs. 



I believe, if you haven't state legislation, that you should have 

 legislation which would permit each county to own its county fair 

 grounds. There should be legislation permitting a small assessment 

 on the people of the county to put up permanent buildings and a 

 small assessment for maintenance. The idea I want to convey is to 

 make your county fair productively busy for 52 weeks in the year. 



I guess I have said about all that I ought to say about the county 

 fairs, but it is a subject that is pretty close to me, and it is one in 

 which I am deeply interested. I suppose you expect me to say some- 

 thing about harness racing and the conditions that exist. It would 

 be foolish for anybody to try and get up before an assemblage here 

 and try to tell them about the close connection there is between har- 

 ness racing and the fair — the two have grown up together. The 

 fairs have made the harness horse, and by attracting the people to 

 the fair the harness horse has helped to make your fairs. His popu- 

 larity is increasing every year. The war is hardly over and yet we 

 have in this country representatives from England, Denmark, Swe- 

 den, Holland and Italy buying horses — harness horses, to take to 

 those countries. The harness horse, as the Iowa farmer knows, is 

 the greatest horse that has ever been trained and makes good any- 

 where and everywhere. He can outsaddle the saddler, he can out- 

 hackney the hackney, and he can cover more ground than any other 

 horse on earth. There has been a good deal of talk by the speed 

 departments about the scarcity of harness horses at the present 

 time. Such inquiries can be answered yes and no. Yes, because 

 so many fairs in the country, not only in the state of Iowa, but other 

 states, believe there is no other time quite so good to hold the county 



