TWENTIETH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 595 



trough, and if they are there an hour, it's a safe proposition to 

 transfer the weight. If you find a bunch of cattle lined up 

 around the tough eating hay and drinking water, let him transfer 

 the weight. But if they are standing around not eating or drink- 

 ing, it's a good idea to re-weigh them. I bought a bunch of one 

 hundred head of cattle when the market was kind of draggy, and 

 a speculator said : "Here is a bunch of cattle for you; just what 

 you want !" And they were all in four pens, and he priced them 

 to me at — I forget the price now, but he wanted to transfer the 

 weight. I went up and took in the situation, and then when he 

 got up there and took in the situation, he forgot to talk any 

 more about transferring the weight — he said, "I'll re-weigh 

 them," and I didn't want to, and he finally said, "I'll re-weigh 

 them anyhow," and I said, "No, your weight is good enough for 

 me, I'll take them that way." He said, "Suppose they shrink, 

 I'll stand it." And so we got them out into an alley and he cut 

 them up into three bunches and weighed them, and I had 1,608 

 pounds. The cattle had been in the yards an hour and forty- 

 five minutes, and that amounted to sixteen or seventeen pounds 

 to the head in an hour and forty-five minutes. 



The Chairman: Now, the next number on the program is a 

 talk on live stock prices, by Henry A. Wallace. As many of you 

 know, Mr. Wallace is associate editor of Wallaces' Farmer. I 

 am sure Mr. Wallace has got something that we will all be inter- 

 ested in hearing, because he has more data on live stock prices 

 covering the past forty or fifty years than any other man in this 

 country. 



LIVE STOCK PRICES. 



By Henry A. Wallace, Associate Editor Wallaces' Farmer. 



Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Corn Belt Meat Producers' Asso- 

 ciation: It has been about four years since I had the pleasure of talking 

 to you gentlemen. At that time hogs were about $6.40 a hundred at 

 Chicago and cattle eight or nine dollars a hundred. At that time I showed 

 you a chart describing the loss period through which you were going, 

 of which you were painfully aware without any charts to convince you 

 of it. I ventured the prediction that a good time was coming to us. Of 

 course, prices went up higher than any of us had any right to anticipate, 

 for we had the $23 hog and $21 cattle; but since then a lot of water has 

 flowed under the bridge and conditions have again changed tremendously. 



I was in Chicago last November attending a meeting of farm econo- 

 mists. After the meeting was over there were nine of us seated about 

 a table in the dining room of the Auditorium Hotel, and out of a spirit 

 of curiosity I asked them to make an estimate as to what the price level 

 of 1926 would be as compared with 1914. Would it be 10 per cent over, 



