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road, and then load it on a narrow-gauge train and transfer it before It 

 really started to market. It makes but little difference whether alfalfa hay 

 is worth ten dollars a ton in Illinois, or fifty dollars a ton, to those people 

 simply because of the fact that the expense of delivering that hay to you 

 would be too great. The only hope that they have is the establishment of 

 herds or the purchase of stock cattle to consume the hay that is produced in 

 that community. I use that as an extreme example of one thing which live 

 stock, and especially beef cattle, are supposed to* do on the farms of the 

 country. 



Handling of beef cattle gives employment to men in a rather uniform 

 way throughout the year. There is no other system of farming, whether 

 you follow it in Illinois or we follow it in Kansas, or in any other section 

 of the United States, where the same number of men can be consistently 

 employed on a farm throughout the year as there is on a farm which is 

 devoted largely to the growing of crops in the summer and to the feeding 

 of the same crops throughout the winter. A good live stock farmer who 

 is feeding, developing and growing beef cattle one year after another, who 

 is keeping about the same number of men employed in the summer growing 

 crops as he does in the winter in the feeding and handling of his live 

 stock, invariably he has the highest class, the most dependable and the 

 most valuable farm help in the community. 



BETTER CROPS AND BETTER MARKETS. 



Handling of live stock in that way serves a double purpose, it gives 

 us a market not only for the crops we have grown, but enables us to em- 

 ploy more efficient men in the growing and development of those crops, 

 thus not only reducing cost of production but increasing gross returns. 



There is a third function which cattle perform on a good many farms 

 of the country. In this immediate vicinity the land may be so rich and 

 so productive that you can disregard everything else and simply grow 

 crops continuously one year after another without any particular attention 

 to the soil, but in the great majority of farming sections of the United 

 States, one of the big functions which is performed by beef cattle on the 

 farms is to consume the feeds that we have grown and to return to the 

 soil a fertilizer in the form of manure, to work up in the form of bedding 

 the straw, and the other things which we produce in connection with grain 

 growing, and thus maintain or increase the fertility of the soil. 



I can illustrate that very nicely on the little piece of land which was 

 bought four years ago. The farm was about as uniform a soil from one 

 one end to the other as you can usually get. During the past season this land 

 produced eighty-one bushels of corn per acre. The farm which is immed- 

 iately adjoining, which four years ago was considered the same exactly, 

 with the same soil, the same season, the same opportunity to grow crops, 

 produced a little over forty bushels per acre. The first farm is handled 

 as a livestock farm, all crops are fed, same feed purchased, straw and 

 stalks converted into manure and applied to the land. The second farm is 

 rented for grain production and everything marketed. That I will admit is 

 another extreme example of doubling the production of corn on the land 

 simply because of the fact that on one side of the fence live stock has 

 been kept, manure put on the land, and the other side continued to haul 

 off corn as it has been farmed for the last thirty years. Frequently the 

 greatest source of profit in livestock feeding comes from additional yield 

 per acre of future crops. 



I never knew a man who rented a feed lot, bought his cattle, bought 

 his feed and tried to make a living that way, who eventually did not go 

 broke. We cannot divorce the feeding of live stock from the production 

 of crops. I never have known a man who produced good beef cattle, owned 

 pastures on which they grazed during the summer and grew the feed which 

 they consumed during the winter, who did not prosper. I never knew 

 a man to go broke following that system in the production of beef. The 

 one system where you buy cattle, buy corn and hire labor is almost a 



