202 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



barns, but he puts a surrey in the carriage shed, a piano in the home, 

 sends the boys and girls to college, and helps pay the preacher and con- 

 vert the heathen. Your Chester Whites and Jersey Reds are to him as 

 commoners to the aristocrat — poor relations. 



In a smaller way in the poultry yard no breeds of fowl will be found 

 more profitable or handsomer in general appearance than the Black Span- 

 ish and Langshans — prolific egg producers. 



But better than all these is the rich black soil of these Mississippi 

 valley farms. What a soil this is! — the bed of the prehistoric ocean, 

 which has hoarded for ages the accumulated detritus of mighty glacial 

 forces, which in ages past robbed the mountains of their primal fertility 

 and stored it up for us; just as now and then some old pirate's pot of ill- 

 gotten gold, long buried, is turned up by the plowman of today. No state 

 in the union possesses so large and uniform an area of this black and 

 treasured wealth of the past as Iowa; farm after farm, section after sec- 

 tion, county after county, from Minnesota to Missouri, from river to 

 river, every acre fertile, every farm a garden spot. Just as in a side of 

 leather, or in a boiled ham, the best cut is toward the center, so the very 

 best of this good, black soil of the Mississippi valley is found in Iowa — a 

 soil alike indifferent to excess or scarcity of rainfall, a soil which like an 

 old friend can always be depended upon, reliable as a Scotch Presby- 

 terian elder, as easily pleased as a child, generous as heaven, responsive 

 as its own fair girls, forgetful of wrong or neglect as a sister of charity, 

 prolific as the hoary ocean, dabbled in by infancy to make mud pies, 

 acquired as a precious heritage and lived from by the matured man and 

 welcomed by him as a last resting place when the day of life is done. 



Black things on Iowa farms are good things; they are the state's 

 best gifts. With them she is gracious, liberal, responsive. You son of 

 toil, wearing out a miserable existence among the stumps, rocks and 

 gravel hills of the east, battling with nature in her most unkindly moods, 

 come here, where the rows of corn are half a mile long, two ears on a 

 stalk, where cows have twin calves and hens lay double-yolked eggs, 

 where the cyclone goes north of us, the blizzard west of us, the drouth 

 south of us, and the untimely frost east of us. Iowa's black soil begets 

 her black horses, black cattle, black pigs and poultry, and the color, 

 somber though it be, has become the insignia of her unequalled agricul- 

 tural prosperity. 



THE OUTLOOK FOR THE BREEDER OF PURE BRED CATTLE. 



Albert Harrah, Newton, Iowa. 

 As long as there is an Iowa farmer who persists in breeding scrub 

 cattle, just so long is there an outlook for the breeder of pure bred cat- 

 tle. For the war on scrubs is a war of conquest to be waged until the 

 last scrub is exterminated from the Iowa soil. This is a strenuous fight, 

 but I rejoice in the advancement made during the past five years. In 

 traveling through the country, I can see the work of grading up is coing 



