FOURTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VI. 469 



Years ago our Scotch and English friends solved this same kind of 

 a problem. They did so by learning to produce beef in a cheaper manner. 

 They grew carrots, beets, turnips and roots of this sort, chopped them 

 up with straw and flavored this mixture with a little American corn and 

 a little American cottonseed meal, and fed this to their steers. The 

 remarkable thing of it all was their cattle grew fat. They even com- 

 peted with our American corn-fed cattle. I do not propose to advise 

 the Iowa farmer to go down on his knees to raise carrots and turnips for 

 his cattle, if for no other reason than because we can raise other coarse 

 feeds that are better. 



In every manufacturing business there comes a time when the mar- 

 gin of profits grows narrower and the waste products must be utilized. 

 There was a time when every cotton gin had its pile of decomposing 

 cottonseed, and the linseed oil manufacturer did not know what to do 

 with the oil cake. In an early day the backbones and ribs of hogs slaugh- 

 tered at an eastern Iowa packing point were hauled out and dumped on 

 the ice of the Mississippi river. As a small boy I can remember how 

 the fishing in the Iowa river was for a time spoiled because a glucose 

 factory 140 miles upstream had dumped its waste products in the river. 

 These same by-products are now a substantial source of revenue of these 

 industries. There is today just as great waste going on upon the corn 

 belt farm as any of those just mentioned. For years we farmers have been 

 wasting 40 per cent of the corn crop. Not many manufacturing con- 

 cerns could stand that per cent of loss. The problem before the corn 

 belt feeder today is to use this by-product as the Scotchman uses his 

 carrots and keep our corn and cottonseed meal at home. 



I believe that beef making will become more and more a matter of 

 production. We must learn to feed more roughness and less corn. A' 

 well-balanced ration but not a ration wastefully rich in grain. We are 

 now and we will be forced to make beef on a narrower margin of profit 

 and it is up to us to utilize our by-products. And I believe that they 

 can best be used by developing a good calf into a first-class baby beef. 



But where is the raw material to come from? Probably the ideal 

 way would be to raise the calf that you expect to feed. But the aver- 

 age farmer cannot well do this. If one tries to pick them up at home or 

 if one goes to the market for them they will nearly always be found to 

 be a very miscellaneous lot and with no similarity of breeding. Many 

 times a calf will look well enough and yet that same calf will be from 

 a cold-blooded old skate of a cow, and it's a sure thing that the longer 

 you keep that calf the more he will come to look like the cow. For this 

 reason it is very important that the feeder knows what kind of breed- 

 ing is back of his calves. 



For a number of years we have been going to the great cattle ranges 

 of Texas to buy our feeding calves. Nearly all the Texas herds are 

 well bred now. Most of them are Herefords. It is not at all diflBcult 

 to buy calves that show the very best of breeding. Today the ranch- 

 man shows a willingness to sell his calves at weaning time. But by the 

 first of September he is making up his mind as to what he will do with 

 his calf crop. If he is to carry them over he must be making the neces- 

 sary arrangements for feed and grass. If he decides to sell them that is 



