Mower County Beef Shorthorns. 105 



is making progress in working out methods.* This 

 station sees in these problems no greater difficulty than 

 once appeared in the problem of securing the milling 

 value of hundreds of new varieties of wheat. That has 

 been accomplished so that with a quart of a new wheat 

 its general value for milling may be determined ap- 

 proximately and at a very slight cost. Here the cost 

 will probably be great, but will it not pay? Certainly 

 the chances are large enough so that it will pay to make 

 investigations. As often happens, while investigating 

 a problem to ferret out the facts regarding some theory, 

 we stumble upon related facts of large practical value. 

 To illustrate, the Minnesota Experiment Station was 

 experimenting to learn whether wheat could be more 

 rapidly improved by having the breeding nursery on 

 rich or on lean soil, and in carrying out that experiment 

 we stum Died upon a plan of arranging nursery plats 

 in plant breeding which permitted the use of planting- 

 machines and otherwise revolutionized, simplified and 

 made cheaper and much better the general plan of 

 breeding many of our field crops. 



No adequate methods are being made to improve 

 our general methods of animal breeding. I dare say 

 that investigations along this line will produce relatively 

 as large returns as the system of feeding experiments 

 now being carried out in a splendid way by experiment- 

 ers. The United States Department of Agriculture and 

 the State experiment stations should attack many of the 

 problems of how best to improve breeds and how to 

 form new breeds. 



Private breeders of Short-horns will naturally ask 

 themselves how their business would be affected by the 

 work of county breeding associations should these be 

 started in each State. In the first place these asso- 

 ciations would become a new market and any breeder 

 who could satisfy the purchasing agents by means 'of 

 records, appearance of the animals and the like that 



See Farmers' Bui. No. 183. . . . U. S. Dept. of Agri. 



