138 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



champion class. The boys, as you all know, are worth more than 

 the steers, and I want to congratulate you, gentlemen of this asso- 

 ciation, upon this excellent program and the unusually sound and 

 good addresses you have had here. I want to congratulate this 

 association upon the excellent work that you have been doing, not 

 only recently, but for a number of years past, in holding to the old 

 ideas (I call them old because a good many of the farmers have 

 been getting away from them) , of feeding the products of the farm 

 on the farm and converting them into high-class meat products. We 

 have had, according to the census report that has been partially got- 

 ten out, an increase of 122% in the value of Iowa farm lands in the 

 past ten years. That seems like a marvelous increase, and yet I ven- 

 ture the prediction that if we were to convert all of the surplus 

 grains and grain products and by-products of the grain produced on 

 Iowa farms into high-class meat and dairy products, and market the 

 surplus on the farm rather than in the raw state for the next ten 

 or fifteen years, our lands would advance 200 per cent. T have 

 that faith in the agriculture of the Mississippi valley, if we keep 

 along right lines. The feature, above all others, that has made 

 Iowa the foremost agricultural state is the fact that she has always 

 not only produced more agricultural products per acre, or a greater 

 output for the state as a whole, but that she has fed a much 

 larger percentage of that product on the farms of Iowa than any 

 other state in the Union. That is the work that you people are en- 

 gaged in ; it is the work that you have given so much intelligent 

 thought and consideration to. 



We have found in recent years that it has been much harder to 

 get to the top at the International and other competitive exhibits 

 than it was originally. We have found, too, that our strongest 

 competitors are coming from the boys who have gone out from Iowa 

 and from Ames. One winning at the International this year that 

 I think you people are directly interested in was the short-fed 

 special class, won by an Ames boy, who is a feeder over in Clinton 

 county. He won with a carload of steers that was by far the best 

 carload of short-fed special steers that has ever been seen at the In- 

 ternational or any other show. They were the ripest and best bunch 

 of cattle, for that length of feeding, that I ever saw, without any 

 exception, and you ought to have that young man here to tell you 

 how he fed those steers. He has grown up in the feeding belt of 

 eastern Iowa, and comes from a family of cattlemen, being a nephew 

 of Mr. Ingwersen, one of the leading cattleman of the Union 

 Stockyards, Chicago. 



