426 OLEOMARGARINE. 



Secretary WILSON. Well, take Iowa, where I am personally 

 acquainted. We have been getting our feeders from beyond the Mis- 

 souri and they are getting scarcer and scarcer, and it is becoming evi- 

 dent that we must produce the feeders on our own grounds. We can 

 not keep a cow to raise a calf only in the Mississippi Valley. We must 

 milk our cow to make a profit. The great feeder in Iowa will become 

 a thing of the past. It has not existed for centuries in European 

 countries. The feeding steer in European countries is raised on the 

 farm and finished on the farm, and that will be the^case in Iowa. We 

 Western farmers like to farm on horseback, and the man who feeds 

 steers likes to buy them and buy corn to feed them, or feed them his 

 own corn; but the day is coming when he can not buy them, because 

 the dairy farmer will find it profitable to raise his own calves and finish 

 his own calves on his own farm with his own products. 



Senator DOLLIVER. Then, you hold that the destruction or fatal 

 injury of the dairy farm would destroy the whole cattle business? 



Secretary WILSON. Yes ; for this reason. I have discussed the South- 

 ern question here. I am very much interested in those people. I go 

 down there often, and find them a lovable people; but I find they 

 have grown crops and oxidized the humus out of their soil until in 

 many cases they do not get more than a quarter of a bale of cotton to 

 the acre. If it had not been for the cotton crop of the great State of 

 Texas, the world would have been suffering for cotton now. There is no 

 way by which they can ever bring the soil back to full fertility except by 

 putting the humus back, and that will be done by letting the cow and 

 her calf graze. What little interest they have now in selling a little 

 bit of cotton-seed oil is infinitesimal compared with the great benefit 

 that will come to them from correct farming, and a well-organized farm 

 means the dairy cow present every time. 



Senator MONEY. You are not going to have it with the increase in 

 population. 



Secretary WILSON. Let me tell you something on that point. There 

 is a man who lives out here about 25 miles in Maryland, named Boyd. 

 He keeps 200 or 300 cows, if I remember correctly, and he sends in 

 excellent milk into this city. He has colored people to milk them. I 

 do not say that every colored man or colored woman is fit to milk a 

 cow. The dairy cow should be treated as delicately as you would treat 

 a fine lady when you take her out to dinner. The negroes will not all 

 do that, but some of them will, and you can make a success in the 

 South of the dairy with colored people for milkers. 



Mr. WADS WORTH. They have never been made a success, have they, 

 Mr. Secretary? 



Secretary WILSON. It has. I have given you one case where a man 

 has 200 o/300 cows and milks them with colored people. He sends 

 the milk into this city. 



Mr. MILLER. Is it not a fact that the beef qattle of the West do not 

 go in the dairy herds, and is it not a fact that the large herds of the 

 West are inbred Herefords, which are not dairy cows ? 



Secretary WILSON. Oh, bless your soul, no. 



Mr. MILLER. Is it not a fact that all Western herds are headed by 

 Hereford bulls? 



Secretary WILSON. No; not exclusively. You ask Senator Harris, 

 who is a Kansas stockman, and he will tell you that men who have 

 been using the Hereford blood find that they have gotten them too 

 small. 



Mr. MILLER. My dear sir, the Hereford are large cattle ; that is why 



