FOURTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VI. 483 



as a business, and if you decide to do so, put a little study into it. This 

 is an age of specialists, and although there is just as much money made 

 in feeding common cattle, provided they are bought as common cattle, 

 as there is in good cattle, you cannot do both. Take up one or the 

 other, and stay by it; every year will add to your knowledge. Notice, 

 I am talking about feeding common cattle, not about raising them. 



There is a great deal of discussion at present as to whether it will 

 pay to keep cows to raise calves on high-priced land, and I am not yet 

 quite satisfied that it will pay to do so in quantities. But I know that 

 there are thousands of farms in Iowa today on which two or three cows 

 each could be kept from what is now absolute waste, and that with a 

 good community bull calves would at fifteen months of age leave a 

 handsome profit. All our good breeds of cattle today come from certain 

 communities staying by certain cattle. This is the history of the Angus, 

 Hereford, Jersey, etc. Here in Iowa at present, the types, breed and 

 quality of cattle are, to say the least, mixed, and it stands to reason that 

 if a certain type of cattle were raised in a certain locality, farmers would 

 never lack for buyers. 



Q. What weight of cattle do you prefer to start? 



Captain Smith : You can't feed what you like. If you are going 

 to feed cattle, as a general rule, you want to buy what the crowd 

 doesn't want at the time you are buying. Two years ago the high- 

 est thing we had in this country was all big cattle. What hap- 

 pened 1 The next year we had all big cattle coming to Chicago, and 

 this year nobody wants them ; now they are all going the other way ; 

 they all want baby beef. You will have all kinds of baby beef and 

 little cattle next year, and there will be big cattle wanted. It may 

 not come that way, but that is the tendency, and you don't want 

 to go with the crowd. When everybody is rushing in and buying 

 cattle at 7 cents you want to stay out. I bought some cattle when 

 the market cheapened ; now they have come back again. When 

 these spectacular advances come and they shoot away up, there is 

 always a hereafter, and you don't want to be in it. 



Q. When you are feeding two or three hundred head of cattle 

 once a day, do you have one man feed? 



Captain Smith: Yes. I have fed 365 calves in one year on 12 

 pounds of shelled corn and 6 pounds of alfalfa hay, and we never 

 varied it. It all went in in one wagon. There were only 2,200 

 pounds of hay and 60 bushels of corn. 



Q. Do you grind your eorn'^ 



Captain Smith : No, sir. 1 ground corn foi- five years, and it 

 was never worth the expense of grinding. Provided you have hogs 

 enough to clean up the waste, it will never pay you to grind. 



Q. Do you feed silage 1 



Captain Smith: Yes, sir. 



