THIRTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART IV 149 



many years to come. They are doing it in England; they are still mak- 

 ing beef and milk together from some of those old Short-horn cows. In 

 Iowa it seems to go by localities. I found towns where I would hear of 

 half a dozen men hauling cream to the station or selling milk to the 

 creamery, and yet feeding some steers. If you run out into that neigh- 

 borhood you will usually find that it is four or five farmers together who 

 are milking the old cow and growing the calf — sometimes on skim-milk, 

 sometimes two calves to the cow, sometimes they were mixing things up 

 in such shape that it would take a Philadelphia lawyer to decide just 

 how they were doing the thing. They grow them on the skim-milk and 

 the feed that they get during the first year, and then they begin to feed 

 them and get them on the market at the age of two years or twenty-six 

 months. The cost of making the finished beef out of that calf is to be 

 taxed against the calf, but the old cow has paid the calf's board up to 

 the end of the first year. It takes a man who is a skillful feeder to 

 handle calves in that way and make them come out well. You can't 

 make a very good steer out of a skim-milk calf — that is, our average idea 

 of one; but calves can be grown on skim-milk with the proper supple- 

 mental feed of oil meal and oats and oil meal and alfalfa hay and 

 silage, and come out right good calves. 



Those are the two main methods of profitable beef production that I 

 have found here in Iowa. There have been some mixtures of the two. 

 Some men have tried to combine a little bit and milk the cow until she 

 begins to slack up; then turn the calf in and let it have the milk the 

 rest of the summer. The good part of the whole thing is that these 

 men are making money at it. 



I have been accused by some men who have heard me talk about beef 

 production in this way of advising everybody in the state of Iowa who is 

 not in the dairy business, or who couldn't get plenty of feeders right 

 away at a cheap price, to go to producing beef in, one of these ways, but 

 I don't want to be taken as advising anything of that kind, because to 

 produce baby beef profitably a man has to know how to grow calves. He 

 has to pay some attention to his business, just the same as the man who 

 is producing any other sort of live stock profitably; just the same as the 

 man who is feeding steers profitably has to go at it with some intelli- 

 gence, and a whole lot more brains than the average man shows who 

 doesn't keep any sort of live stock; because if he showed the very highest 

 grade of intelligence, he would be likely to keep some live stock on his 

 farm to keep up its fertility. Not every farmer is fitted for that sort of 

 business, or has his labor or market conditions so that he can handle 

 every sort of beef production; but there are a good many men in Iowa 

 who are selling corn this year for from 33 to 40 cents a bushel who will 

 come to the point where they will keep some cattle on those farms, when 

 they can't get feeders, because they are beginning to find that this fer- 

 tility proposition is worth looking into. We had Professor F. G. King, 

 of the Indiana experiment station, on our beef cattle special last Decem- 

 ber, and he startled some of us when he told us that Indiana's fertilizer 

 bill for the last year amounted to a little more than the total receipts 

 from the sales of their surplus live stock from that state. The Illinois 



