148 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



pastures. They were men who cut the ragweed before it went to seed, 

 and some of them had paid a little attention to disking the seed-bound 

 places and putting in a little grass seed on the places where it had been 

 killed out. 



Another thing was the silo. Professor Evvard has talked silage to you 

 a good while, and I would like to talk it some more, because the silo is 

 one of the indispensable things when you are trying to make baby beef. 

 When you can feed the old cow through the winter on from 35 to 40 

 pounds of silage and 6 or 7 pounds of hay, and have her come out in 

 better shape in the spring than she went in in the fall, you can afford 

 to keep her for the calf she will raise. If you try to feed her out on 

 $15 clover hay, supplemented with high-priced corn, you can't afford to 

 keep her for the calf she will raise. But when you make use of these 

 cheaper feeds in the winter-time, you can do it at present prices, or even 

 at a little bit lower prices than we have right now. 



In addition to the points mentioned, the making use of rough feed in 

 other ways than through the silo, and the furnishing of proper shelter 

 comes in. Good care of the cattle themselves helps out a whole lot in 

 lowering this cost of beef production. A man who goes into the baby 

 beef business with the expectation of not paying any attention to the 

 calves is likely to have a pretty low per cent of live calves to his credit 

 when he gets his calves finally out on pasture and sucking the cow for the 

 summer. If he is going to make a success of the business, he must 

 know something about the cattle business, and follow that pretty closely 

 while he is in it. He can't be in a good many other jobs at the same time 

 and depend altogether on the hired man. The boys will do better than 

 the hired man, usually, especially if they own a share in those calves. 



There is another way of producing beef here in Iowa that brings even 

 a little more profit than the straight baby beef proposition. This is a con- 

 vention of the meat producers of the state, and it is not safe, I sup- 

 pose, to say much about dairying! I reckon, too, it is not safe to talk 

 about that dual purpose cow; in fact, I have never said anything about 

 that dual purpose cow before any audience but what I have been stepped 

 on before I got outside the door! But it is a good deal this way about 

 the dual purpose cow for the Iowa farm. As one of the boys up at Ames 

 put it one time when I was debating the question of whether or not there 

 was a dual purpose cow: "The theory of the dual purpose cow has been 

 dead for twenty years or more; but as a living fact, the old cow is on 

 hundreds of Iowa farms today."' And she is. I did not know there were 

 so many of them until I began to hunt around for this beef-producing 

 proposition in Iowa. I have struck a great many farmers who are keep- 

 ing the old red cow that milks pretty well and is still able to produce 

 a calf that will feed out into a decent sort of steer; and I have met a good 

 many who are making money on just that proposition. They made it this 

 last year, and are expecting to do it again this year, and for a good many 

 years to come. And while I don't want to pose as a prophet (you know 

 what the Bible says about the old prophets being dead and the young 

 prophets fools), I will be fooled just the same unless there is a good 

 deal more beef production in that way carried on in Iowa for a good 



