494 TWENTY-THIRD ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 



in July, which took in representatives of the western growing — rather, 

 producing — areas for cattle and sheep. As a result of these two confer- 

 ences, a rather definite program of work was drawn up, and that is the 

 program that we are now engaged in putting into effect. 



In the matter of crop estimates, the efforts of the Department have 

 •all been centered largely upon estimating the amount of crops that were 

 grown — that is, what has been the production in each state and in the 

 country as a whole, of specific crops. They have never devoted any 

 time to the marketing or available market supplies of crops except as 

 those can be assumed from the general production. 



With this live stock work, however, two distinct aims are in view. 

 One is to estimate the changes in productions of live stock, the increases 

 or decreases from year to year on farms and ranches of all classes of live 

 stock, and the other is to estimate what are the available supplies of live 

 stock that are apt to be ready for market within the shortest periods 

 of time — seasonable supplies, and it is this work of trying to determine 

 what are the seasonable supplies in which I am most actively engaged. 

 But in order to get a background, a historical background, that can be of 

 use in determining these probable available market supplies, it has been 

 necessary for us to do considerable work in getting back data of what 

 have been the live stock movements in the past, and we have been doing 

 a great deal of work in the last few months with the different agencie 5 

 which handle live stock from the time it leaves the farm until it finally 

 goes into consumption to get dependable information along these lines. 



This has been obtained from railroads, from packers, from stock- 

 yards, from concentration points, from all people who handle live stock. 

 Our aim with the railroads has been to start January 1, 1922, and get a 

 station record of receipts and forwardings of all classes of live stock by 

 species, by months, from that period down to January 1 of this year for 

 all railrods or for all systems west of the Ohio-Pennsylvania line and 

 north of the Ohio river. That means that we have had to go to the rail- 

 roads and ask them to either prepare this for us or make available their 

 records by which we could prepare it. 



When this is finally secured, it is going to give us a very valuable 

 index as to what is the movement of live stock in the country. In Iowa, 

 for example, our intention is to organize that on a county and regional 

 basis. That is, we will take all the stations in a particular county and 

 we will know the shipments in and the shipments out of all kinds of live 

 stock in that county for each month in the year, and we will be able 

 then to determine what is the importance of each county in the state as 

 a live stock producing county and a live stock shipping county. We will 

 also know how many carloads of cattle, for instance, are shipped out of 

 a county, and how many are shipped in, which will give us the first 

 index as to what the local production in that county is above what is 

 brought in from the outside. 



Prom the stockyards, all the larger stockyards in the country, we 

 secured a monthly report for this same period, showing the state of 

 origin of the receipts of the different classes of live stock by months, 

 so that we will know at each one of these markets just how many of the 

 different species each state has contributed. We are getting the same 



