EIGHTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART VII 379 



a whole were in such an uncertain frame of mind as they are just at the 

 present moment. I know that is the feeling of our cattle men in Kansas 

 and in the southwest generally, and from what I have been able to glean 

 from the opinion of the men here as expressed this morning, the same 

 spirit seems to prevail among the cattlemen of Iowa. They are up against 

 a new set of conditions, problems which they have not been able to 

 anticipate; so that they hardly know in what direction they shall at- 

 tempt to move. 



There are, however, a few fundamental principles in the production 

 and handling of live stock that go on thru our industry regardless of 

 temporary conditions. The first of these is that we must have the live 

 stock to feed to convert our farm products into beef, and that we should 

 do it in the most efficient manner possible. It has been the history of 

 this country and every other that those communities which have re- 

 mained in the cattle business in spite of all conditions which might 

 confront them, and of all temptations for them to discontinue, have 

 eventually come out on top; that is, they have become the leading agri- 

 cultural communities in their states or counties. We have today in this 

 great world war a further illustration of that fact. The countries that 

 are contending for supremacy today are not those which have neglected 

 their live stock industries, but those which in fact and in truth have 

 been known for all time as the leading live stock countries of the world. 

 Food is one of the most important factors in the winning of this war, 

 and those countries which are best able to feed their armies, which are 

 producing the most crops per man or per acre or per any other unit, 

 are the ones which will eventually win. If we go out in any direction 

 from Des Moines, or any other city or town in this part of the country, 

 and pass a large number of farms, we find that the same thing applies 

 to the individual farm that applies to the country or nation as a whole, 

 i. e., that those farms which have been continually devoted to the pro- 

 duction of live stock stand out alone as the most productive, most prof- 

 itable, best improved farms which we have in our communities. 



The cattle business, fortunately, has not rested entirely upon the 

 immediate profits which we have secured from the feeding of our cattle 

 or from the conversion of our farm grain feeds into beef. There are 

 other profits which enter into it that we are not able to measure at the 

 moment but which in the end usually amount to considerably more 

 than the primary profits from the industry itself. The first of these, prob- 

 ably, which is so well known, is that live stock farming of course in- 

 creases or improves the fertility of the soil and increases the yield of 

 crops per acre. A few years ago, when I was connected with the Indiana 

 experiment station, we made a sort of an office census of that entire state. 

 We found that on an average the farms in Indiana at that time which 

 were devoted to the production of beef were worth 40 per cent more than 

 the average farms of the state. We found that while the average yield 

 of corn in the state for the ten-year period which was under investigation 

 was 32 bushels per acre, the average yield of corn on the cattle farms of 

 the state was slightly over 50 bushels during the same period. It is 



