THIRTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART IV 147 



dred. That meant that they brought $69 a head. We figured up the 

 amount of feed that it had taken to produce those calves, and instead 

 of taking each man's farm prices, we standardized the price, putting an 

 average of 60 cents a bushel on corn, corn silage as high as $4 a ton; 

 clover hay as high as $15 a ton; and we charged the old cow and her 

 calf $1.50 a month for pasture during the pasture season. For these 816 

 calves it cost, counting the cost of keeping not only the cow that pro- 

 duced the calf, but the extra cows necessary to produce just about an 

 average of 85 per cent of calves, the cost of service, of feeding the calf 

 up to the time of sale, and everything else, it cost about $62 a head under 

 1911 and 1912 conditions, growing them up to 832 pounds in weight. 

 That means that there was $7 a head profit on those calves. 



That looked to me like a pretty fair solution — for some men at least — 

 of this feeder cattle proposition. That is not handed out as a cure-all 

 for everybody, or with the thought that all the cattle feeders ought not 

 to buy feeders any more, but go into the production of baby beef; but it 

 shows that some men are producing beef on Iowa land that ranges as 

 high as $225 an acre down to as low as $95, and some of it even as low 

 as $85 or $90 an acre, sweeping from the northwestern part of the state 

 clear down to the southeastern. These figures came from close to eighty 

 counties, so that they are fairly representative of the state of Iowa. 



The man who made the most money on his calves was the one who had 

 the best grade of breeding stock to start with. It does not take long to 

 see that you can't make baby beef out of dairy stock or a very poor 

 grade of scrub stock. Your cow must be a pretty fair grade of breeding 

 cow, with some beef blood in her. She does not need to be what you call 

 a high-class beef cow, but she must have some beef type. The strongest 

 emphasis needs to be laid on the character of the sire of these calves from 

 which we are going to try to make baby beef. You can't make baby 

 beef out of the calves that come from what is commonly known as a glue 

 bull — one that dresses out into more hoofs, horns and bones than he does 

 beef; the calves don't begin to mature early enough; they won't fatten 

 out, and there is no use in monkeying with them. The sort of sire the 

 man had who made the best success out of the baby beef proposition 

 was a bull of low-set, close-to-the-ground type, wide and thick-fleshed, 

 heavy in the hind quarters, thick, heavy and smooth in the loin, and 

 wide in the ribs and back. I have seen a good many of the sires that 

 have been getting baby beef calves during the last year, and the men who 

 are making the best at this business don't always buy a bull with just 

 the proper turn of horn for a prize winner in that particular breed, or the 

 proper markings, or anything of that kind; but they go out after the sire 

 that is strong where you want your calf to be strong. You can't get the 

 baby beef calf from any other source except a sire that would have made 

 a good baby beef himself. 



Another thing is the care of the pastures. The men who made the 

 best success out of the baby beef business took the best care of their 

 blue grass pastures, who had the most stock on the fewest acres of pas- 

 ture, who got the most food off every acre; and most of these men who 

 were doing good work in that line were hauling some manure on these 



