THIRTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VIII 473 



PUBLIC SALES. 



MR. C. E. LUTHEE, GRAND JUNCTION, IOWA. 



"This public sale question means a good deal to a good many people. 

 I suppose this subject of 'Public Sales' means the difference between 

 public sales and private sales. I think a private sale is a good thing 

 some times providing you can sell your property readily and quickly. A 

 great many times in the fall and winter a farmer will have a bunch of hogs 

 advertised in all the newspapers in Iowa to sell at private sale. He will 

 say, 'I have so many gilts or males that I will sell at so many dollars.' 

 Some of these men will close out and some will not. They have paid for 

 advertising and worked hard all fall and winter and maybe missed a 

 chance to go out and buy some good hogs for themselves. The man who 

 sells at private sale has to stay at home in order to catch the buyer and 

 he will work all year to sell those hogs. 



"If he has a public sale he will close them out in one day. Sometimes 

 he has something left on his hands but as a rule if a man has a public 

 sale he sells everything in one day. Perhaps he don't get as much money 

 but he gets it all at once, and it comes handier to pay off bills with than 

 if it came in little sums. 



"A public sale is a great thing to think about. Sometimes a man makes 

 a mistake in making his public sale and sometimes the auctioneer makes 

 a mistake. An auctioneer may go to conduct a sale where there will be a 

 large crowd and he thinks he is going to make a great success of that 

 sale but if he don't know how to handle the hogs he will make a failure 

 and then perhaps the very next day go to a small crowd and when he 

 gets through everything will be satisfactory. It depends sometimes on 

 the man who is having the sale — whether he has been honest with the 

 breeders in the past — whether he has made good his statements. When 

 a man is having a public sale if he makes a statement that he will do so 

 and so, I say he must make the statement good not by his word alone 

 but by his honor and it will have the right effect on his next sale. But 

 if a man makes a sale and makes statements that he don't fulfill, that 

 makes a difference. I know of instances where men have bought hogs and 

 when they got them home they were not at all as they should be or as they 

 were represented. Perhaps the man who sold the hog don't know it and 

 perhaps he does. He will tell you he did not know it, and sometimes he 

 don't, but that is a mighty poor thing for a man making a public sale. 

 A man may say he has hogs with large litters, twelve or fifteen to the 

 litter. I don't believe there is a sow living that raised fifteen pigs. I 

 never had one raise more than eight or nine and raise them right. She 

 may have had that many pigs, but did she raise that many. That is the 

 point a man wants to make. Be careful when you make these state- 

 ments and make them in a way that you can substantiate them. 



"After your sale is over don't be months getting out your pedigrees. 

 That hurts a public sale. You can all have public sales if you will do 

 as you ought to do. When a man has a sale he should say to the auction- 

 eer to make only statements that are true, to do all he can do to sell 

 the stuff honestly and if he can't sell it for what it is worth to take what 



