SIXTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART VIII. 585 



tell you you cannot afford to let a calf suck its mother. I don't under- 

 stand it that way. My experience has been two calves with one cow is 

 the best result I ever had. If a man comes to your place and tells you 

 he has a separator that will raise calves as well as the mother I would 

 not buy it. If it did it would not be a good separator and you cannot 

 raise them as good as you did tlie other way. I raise my calves, nearly 

 all of them as I tell you, two calves on a cow. Once in a while we have a 

 calf fed by hand and that calf shows the difference. Since I have been 

 on the farm I never have fed but one of three year old cattle. I bought 

 a car load of three year old cattle and fed them out. This last year I 

 began in August feeding my cattle, and I fed them on barley, and I found 

 they did as well as on corn. I fed them barley until the corn was large 

 enough to feed, and I fed them on corn until December. I have done that 

 two or three times, and I am not yet satisfied with that. I have now 

 seventeen calves from last year, about half of them are heifers, and I 

 expect to feed them out by next June. I believe the best time to market 

 a steer is when it is eighteen months old; I believe we v.ill get more for 

 the money we put in them than at any other age. With the proper care 

 and handling through the winter, and shelter, a calf will weigh 750 or 

 800 pounds, and you can have good ones if you have the right kind Ol 

 stock. As far as keeping dairy cattle on the farm, I am satisfied it is i\ 

 good thing. I am satisfied the man who has a small farm is wise in 

 keeping good dairy cattle. 



Address by W. L. Hates, before Mahaska County Farmers' Institute. 



I will say I have been a citizen of Mahaska county for forty-seven. 

 years. I have fed cattle in Mahaska county for twenty-eight years as 

 feeders, and hogs for thirty-two years. Now, what do we keep a hog on 

 cur farm for? To decorate our farms? No. We keep them on our farms 

 for the dollar that is in them. If we cannot get a dollar out of them we 

 had better be without them, for they are subject to diseases — hog cholera 

 and the hog measles and lung fever. I have lost several thousand dollars 

 through these diseases. Chloral epsom is the best cure for these diseases 

 I have struck anywhere. 



The first gentleman on the floor I disagree witli on one point: about 

 the labor lie puts into hogs, the expense he goes to for building. It is 

 all right to have good shelter for hogs, but it looks like putting two 

 dollar's worth of labor into one dollar's worth of profit for your hogs. 

 I used to raise my hogs and feed out, and of late years I buy, buy them 

 up in the spring, turn them on clover pasture and let them run through 

 the summer up until harvest time, turn them in on an oat field or rye 

 field, turn them from a rye field into the corn field, ten, fifteen or twenty 

 acres at a time. I have hogged down corn that would make eighty-five 

 bushels to the acre, and they ate that corn; drove them out of the corn 

 field, loaded them on the cars -and shipped to Chicago. So I do not do 

 much labor to get them to market. 



Three years ago, I believe, last spring, I paid $675.85 for 140 head of 

 hogs. I turned those hogs on the grass, I run them on the grass through 

 the summer and then on the rye and through the corn. I shipped those 



