76 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



did not pay the cost of keeping. I have on my hands to-day 

 fifty more ; half of them are as fat as they need be, but there 

 is no ready market for them. 



Theodore Louis (of Wisconsin) . That comes somewhat 

 in my line. The governor has stated that the difficulties of 

 the agricultural situation to-day come from a lack of business 

 qualifications as well as knowledge in the farmer. The gen- 

 tleman last up said he had fifty hogs for which he was offered 

 five cents a pound dead weight, and he kept those hogs six 

 weeks. If he had taken a pencil and figured out the food 

 consumed by those hogs, he would have found that he was 

 losing money by keeping them. Why not, then, do as other 

 business men do, — sell his product for a less price, if he 

 cannot get what he thinks he ought to have? Why should 

 he not have shipped those hogs to Boston, instead of sub- 

 jecting himself to the expense of feeding them for six weeks ? 

 I would look at this question simply from a business point 

 of view. The reason why he could not sell his hogs w.t 

 because there was an overplus of hogs in the market. It 

 was the deficiency of corn in the West that made the farmers 

 there throw their hogs upon the market, because they had 

 nothing to feed them with. The present situation of the hog 

 market is this, — that the farmer of the corn belt, instead of 

 receiving forty-five or fifty cents for his corn, anticipates 

 that Germany will consume a great deal of our Indian corn ; 

 he knows that there is no old corn in the cribs of the coun- 

 try, and he calculates upon getting a higher price. But the 

 packer at the same time makes the other calculation. The 

 Chicago, the St. Louis and the Boston packers make their 

 calculation that when the packing season commences there 

 will be a fall in the price of hogs. They know precisely the 

 number of hogs in the country. Each packer knows how 

 many hogs we have in the country, because every drover 

 and buyer in the West will take the statistics of the number 

 of hogs as he goes about buying. Hogs are now being sent 

 to market in great numbers. Chicago received on an 

 average last week sixty thousand a day. The receipts 

 exceeded anything ever known in that city. The average 

 weight of those hogs was from one hundred and twenty to 

 one hundred and fifty pounds. They were not ready for 



