194 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



Down in Wright county, in judging last year, I had brought before me 

 a Percheron stallion, a Shire stallion, a standard bred stallion and a 

 Shetland stallion for championship show. Now, I want to ask you 

 farmers, if you had a class of corn to judge, how would you like sweet 

 corn, pop corn, reds and white and yellow dent corn brought in competi- 

 tion for you to judge as to the championship? I made one fellow mad 

 when I told him that I would not place a championship premium on a 

 Shetland pony horse, no matter what anybody thought about it. I think 

 that we ought to encourage the things that are most vitally important in 

 agriculture; that means the improvement of the draft horse, beef cattle, 

 hogs, sheep and such things as farmers are interested in. 



Now, another point: We have a fair at Ames, and I am going to take 

 a little privilege this afternoon of bragging on the little pumpkin show. 

 We have up there, you know, all the races usually held at fair ground 

 race tracks, trotting, pacing, riding horses, carriage and buggy teams, 

 and it is a lot of fun; but the main thing in that show is the educational 

 feature. I want to say, in all due respect to other premium lists, that it 

 is one of the best premium lists I have ever seen in the whole state. It 

 gives premiums on things that the farmers are most interested in. And 

 if you men should drop in there and see the farmers, and the farmers' 

 wives and daughters and sons Vv^atching the judging of those horse and 

 cattle classes, you would see that it was the thing they were most vitally 

 interested in. Now, Mr. Clark, I want to ask what it is that has made 

 the Marshalltown fair and the Waver ly fair what they are? It is simply 

 the attention they have given to their classification of live stock, to their 

 classification of grain, to their classification of domestic science. As. the 

 gentleman said here, these are the things that concern the farmer and the 

 farmer's wife; and those are the things that are the most important. 



Now, speaking on the horse question again: Another thing we find 

 very important in giving premiums, and that is that fairs are com- 

 pelled to throw two breeds of horses together. If you just throw the 

 draft horses, the Clydesdales and the Shires together, and the Percherons 

 and Belgians together, then it makes it better judging than if you pour 

 them all together in a common herd. 



Coming to the cattle classes: Last year, at a fair which I will not 

 mention, I had come before me (and this in a beef neighborhood, where 

 beef is the improved type of cattle) for championship of all breeds, the 

 champion dairy bull. Now, I want to tell you, if there is a man in this 

 state who can do justice to that sort of classification, I would like to see 

 him. When I had given the championship to one of the best Jerseys in 

 the state, I had to make my getaway suddenly to save my hide. And it 

 is not fair to the farmers themselves, it is not fair to the man who is to 

 judge, and the thing we are asking is that, through your cooperation, we 

 can get up a circular, or bulletin, outlining a few of these things most 

 common (these few mistakes we find all through the fairs), embodying 

 the features in the premium lists that are real good, and get them out 

 over the state so we can have uniformity of classification. 



Now, along the hog line: At a fair last year we had a man come down 

 to show in the produce class (the class for sows and products). We had 



