58 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



sales. Above the office, dining room and mam entrance are 

 sleeping quarters for the men in charge of the stock during the 

 sale and for the assistants in the cattle department during the 

 state fair. Care has been taken to provide equipment which will 

 insure the adequate heating of these quarters in the coldest 

 weather. 



The barn and sale pavilion, when present contracts are com- 

 pleted, will cost $204,000.00. One hundred and fifty thousand 

 dollars of this amount was made available by state appropriation 

 of the Thirty-eighth General Assembly. The balance, $54,000.00 

 has been advanced out of the surplus of the 1920 state fair. 



In order to give a clearly, unbiased report of the entire fair 

 for 1920, there is submitted in the following pages, a group of 

 articles collected from the leading agricultural and live stock 

 journals of the Middle West. The reports printed by these 

 journals are prepared by their most experienced writers, all of 

 whom are authorities in this field. 



AMERICA'S FOREMOST FARMERS' FAIR. 

 From The Breeders' Gazette, Chicago, III. 



INDUSTRY, ORGANIZATION, WEALTH, ACHIEVEMENT. 



These fundamentally interlocking words spell Iowa, as, magnificently 

 arrayed in the majesty and grandeur of gala attire, donned in honor of a 

 public occasion, this opulent Ceres stood in an attitude of triumphant 

 self-revealment in her capital city of Des Moines last week. 



That is one way to introduce the goddess. It may be worse than it 

 sounds. This alleged writer lay awake all night on a Rock Island train 

 trying to phrase it. The result is wholly unworthy of the splendid sight 

 which inspired his audacity. He may lose his job for printing it, for a 

 report of an agricultural exposition never was begun, although one might 

 be finished, on a Rock Island train. He has deliberately and somewhat 

 laboriously detoured for a moment out of an old reportorial rut because 

 there never was a state fair like Iowa's. What is more, there never 

 was a state, and there is no state, like Iowa. Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, 

 Minnesota, Nebraska and the rest cannot justifiably take offense at this 

 statement. It is entirely free from intended comparisons, odious or other- 

 wise. Iowa is incomparable; so is its fair. Most of Iowa's land surface 

 assays pay dirt. It is a farming state in a favored climatic zone, inhab- 

 ited by people who, in any other state, probably would not think clearer 

 or farm any better than their neighbors. It is hard to farm unprofitably 

 if one farms at all in Iowa. A land that makes prodigious quantities of 

 meat and milk must make money. Iowa is a granary, meathouse and 

 creampot. Nevertheless, some of its farmers, presumably unable to en- 

 dure prosperity, have gone to Canada or elsewhere, to learn, we fear, 



