166 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



Iowa and the middle west. Now, there are some men who have a very 

 exalted opinion as to their position and their place in the world, but 

 men who really do things are usually modest ahout it, and I believe 

 that you belong to the modest sort. I have been wondering whether you 

 know or realize hov/ much of the fertility of Iowa, of the future citizen- 

 ship of Iowa, of the future statesmanship of Iowa, depends upon the 

 men who are present here tonight. 



Iowa, I believe, feeds about eighty per cent of its corn. There is 

 about twenty per cent of it that goes across state lines. The men who 

 are the best custom^ers for the corn are the men who feed live stock, and 

 if the live stock business was to go out, you would hear a wail from one 

 end of the state to the other, and you would not any longer talk about 

 land worth two, three, four or five hundred dollars an acre, ifpon the 

 stockmen of Iowa, depends very largely the maintenance of the fertility 

 of her soil, and there is no way, gentlemen, of maintaining soil fertility 

 except by adding to it vegetable matter. Twenty years of farming wears 

 out the vegetable matter in the soil which the Lord has been putting 

 here for about 7,000 years, or such a matter. When you wear that out, 

 j'-ou must restore it. How are you going to restore it except by growing 

 live stock? You let the corn growers go on for another twenty-five 

 years, and it will be a different Iowa from what you see now, growing 

 corn and sending it off to the markets of the world for somebody else 

 to make money out of. \y'hat nation on this earth ever got rich by 

 sending crude raw material? You must send it in the shape of the 

 finished product, and your finished product is live sto.ck — the best cat- 

 tle, the best hogs, the best horses — I won't say the best sheep, but we 

 will com.e to that by and by — on the face of the earth. The only other 

 way you can do it is by growing clover and plowing it under once 

 in four years, and you are not going to do that Nobody else will. 

 You have therefore a most important place to take in this country. 



Now, mind you, if you don't look out, you are going to hear some- 

 thing drop. Congress can not stand up against the hungry stomach, 

 and the first thing you know the ports of the Atlantic and the Gulf 

 will be throv/n open to the cattle from South America, and you will 

 have to sell your cattle at the prices that the South Am^erican will ask 

 for his, on the Atlantic, Pacific and on the Gulf of Mexico. Then where 

 will the corn raiser be? For the next thing that v/ill follow is taking 

 the tariff off corn, and the price you will get for your corn is the 

 price at the port, less what the railroads charge you. Now it isn't 

 these measly democrats that are going to do that altogether. (Laugh- 

 ter.) Not by any means. It is the men who handle "big business.'' 

 And there is no politics in big business. We used to have a man 

 at this meeting who gave us some grand addresses. You know who 

 I mean — Murdo MacKenzie. You know where he is now? In Brazil, 

 on a salary of $50,000 a year, looking after the cattle of John Rocke- 

 feller and Stillman and Morgan. Those men* think in world ideas, and 

 they knov/ that sooner or later they will be able to get a ship subsidy 

 and throw open the ports of the Atlantic to South American meats. 

 What are you going to do about it? So I might talk on a long time. 



