146 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



1912 we had about 37,000,000 head, or a little better. Secretary Wilson's 

 latest announcement is about 36,200,000 head, and personally I believe 

 that he is just a little bit high in his estimate. But from the figures that 

 I could gather from the secretaries of the boards of agriculture, the 

 cattlemen, the secretaries of the beef producers' associations, and all 

 the organizations that I could reach during this last year, I have come 

 to the conclusion that there are just about forty per cent of the breeding 

 beef cattle in the west, the northwest and the southwest, that there were 

 eight, ten and twelve years ago. I don't claim that these figures are ab- 

 solutely right or authentic, but from the figures I can get together from 

 these sources, that is just about the situation. The fact that so much 

 land has been placed under irrigation, so much dry farming propaganda 

 distributed, and so much of the range country cut up into small farms 

 and homesteaded, has spoiled the cattle range. Also, the sheepman has 

 come in, and that has helped spoil the feeder supply out there, because 

 where the sheep graze the cow has pretty slim picking. 



All these facts together set me to thinking that perhaps we were not 

 going to be able to get enough feeders. Those of you who have tried to 

 buy feeders any time within the last year have had that brought home 

 pretty plainly, because you have not been able to get the feeders you 

 wanted at prices you would like to pay. Sometimes they make a man's 

 hat rise straight up, if he has any hair underneath it, when they price 

 these feeders that you would like to take home. So I tried to see if in 

 the state of Iowa there was any way of getting around this feeder cattle 

 proposition; whether we could raise beef cattle here; whether anybody 

 had done it; whether there was any prospect of profit in it. As soon as 

 I began to ask men about this, the average man in the cattle feeding 

 business would tell me right away: "You can't keep a cow on $150 or 

 $200 Iowa land for her calf and make any money at it; you have got to 

 milk the cow if you keep her in Iowa." But I hated to take that sort of 

 an answer all the way around, and so I began to hunt around for men who 

 had been doing something of that sort, and I visited, all told, during this 

 last year, ninety-seven men who have been keeping cows and growing 

 what we call baby beef here in Iowa, 



You have seen from the chart that Professor Evvard showed you a 

 short time ago that there is some saving in the baby beef proposition 

 over the two-year-olds when you have the cattle all grown here. The 

 yearling feeds out better. Of the ninety-seven men that I found who had 

 been growing baby beef in Iowa, I could get figures from just twenty- 

 four. The rest could not tell me that they made some money; a couple 

 said they hadn't made any. Only two were visited who had lost money 

 during a period of from three to twelve years, and even those two thought 

 they had made a little this last year. But from the twenty-four men 

 referred to I got pretty fairly accurate figures on the total cost of pro- 

 ducing those calves. During the last year these men had produced 816 

 calves. They had brought them along as calves following the cows to 

 pasture, had fed them from weaning time on. and sold them some time be- 

 tween the last of April and the first of September. They averaged about 

 832 pound? per head, apd they sold at an average price of $8.60 a bun- 



