SHELTER BELT AS A FACTOR IN STOCK GROWING, 217 



tain extent because we must protect them against hard storms. 

 With money comparatively cheap at the present time, labor is the 

 great factor, and the consequence is that we want to so handle the 

 cultivation of our crops with the implements we have that we shall 

 have a minimum expenditure for labor. 



Let me call attention to the stock foods. The corn plant, how we 

 can grow it! How easily we can grow corn, and in growing food for 

 stock the corn field is the best proposition. I want to say a word 

 right here in favor of an implement that has recently come into use 

 and has come to stay, and that is the corn harvester. You cannot 

 afford to go out and cut corn a hill at a time, but you take a corn 

 harvester and sweep over ten acres a day. Then they are making 

 naachines now by which you can throw a rope around a shock and 

 lift it bodily upon the wagon. This corn I know I can put into shock 

 and then haul it wherever I want it in a sheltered place to feed ton 

 for ton cheaper than you can handle hay. 



Take the sheep. Notice their characteristics. One thing is this: 

 they are well protected with wool; they do not want to go into warm 

 stables; they like freedom. You confine a sheep, and it will shed its 

 wool. Give him fresh air, do not let the wind get at him and give 

 him cornstalks, corn and all. I notice in the litter how clean every- 

 thing is taken up. Give them a dry position, dry ground. Prof. 

 Greenley just scatters it on the ground. There is a world of mean- 

 ing in what my friend Theodore Louis says, "They eat in quietude." 

 It did not surprise me yesterday to receive a letter from my man at 

 home in which he says, ''The sheep are fairly thriving." 



Oats cut early, cut before ripe and put into to stack make an excel- 

 lent food. It avoids the cost of the threshing machine; they do not 

 shed and keep green and nice. It is a-wonderful food. We know 

 something of scientific farming. They have got to have a heat food, 

 and corn and oats. How nice it is to have those foods. It is only 

 now and then we want shelter for our sheep. When we have severe 

 storms we can pack them together for a few days. They are confined 

 a good deal like human beings on a vessel, and they will stand it 

 very well for two or three days. As soon as the storm is over they 

 are in the open. They must, in the west, sell their stock in the fall. 

 The stock we have got was bought in the west, so we can take the 

 stock and feed it, and, as Prof. Shaw has said, we do not have to build 

 expensive barns. 



The trees are friends of the farmer in the west. In most cases we 

 want an enclosed shelter from the driving storms and blizzards, and 

 I want that sJielter surrounded by trees. What experience I 

 had in that line in the early years was a valuable lesson to me, when 

 I had two tunnels thirty feet long through the drifts and carried 

 water to the stock in the sod stable, a pailful at a time. Do you won- 

 der I love trees and hate treeless farms? 



As to the different classes of stock. A few words about steers. 

 They are much like the sheep in that they will stand cold. Cold is 

 a stimulant to appetite. They do not need a first-class shelter, — and 

 here is another thought I want to give to you; what we want is de- 

 cayed vegetable matter. If there is anything I hate around the barn 

 it is a cornstalk. We drag our corn out into the pasture, the stock 



