160 



certain road to financial destruction, the other system where you grow 

 cattle, grow corn, and if possible grow labor along with it, is a system which 

 is bound to win. 



Cattle perform another very important function on the farm. They 

 furnish us a market for feeds which would otherwise have but little or no 

 commercial value, and that is illustrated in this way: in the state of 

 Kansas, where this year we have an abundance of feed, more feed than we 

 have. cattle to consume it in the wintering of our breeding cattle, there 

 is a herd of forty-six breeding cows, all of which raised calves last year 

 and which are being wintered this year; since those cattle were brought 

 in off of the pastures in the middle of November, they have been maintained 

 entirely on the residue of the crops which have been marketed, which have 

 been grown as grain crops. Because of the scarcity of live stock in that 

 immediate community, and the impossibility of selling stalk fields and 

 straw, which have no commercial value, those cows have been wintered 

 up until the present day, and will continue until the first of March, at a 

 cost of $156, a little less than four dollars a head for the winter. That 

 compares very favorably with the cost of nearly twenty dollars a head 

 for the same period at a time when feeds were not quite so abundant as 

 they are at the present. I use that to illustrate that whenever you get 

 into a community where live stock has been eliminated almost entirely 

 from the system of farming it leaves no market whatever for such things 

 as cannot be marketed in their original form. In other words, where there 

 are no cattle there is no market for stalk fields, there is no market for 

 straw, there is no market for damaged hay, if a long distance from the 

 railroads, even the commercial crops suffer for lack of a market. 



SAFE AND PROFITABLE INVESTMENT. 



Cattle fulfill another very important place. If anyone is in such finan- 

 cial circumstances that they have a surplus of wealth, cattle furnish a 

 very good place in which to invest a considerable amount of money and to 

 return an interest on your investment. At present cattle paper, which 

 is not as well received at it was a couple of years ago, is demanding 

 approximately eight per cent throughout the entire United States. Nothing 

 looks safer this year than good cattle paper. I do not know of any other 

 way in which money can be invested with a return of eight percent on a 

 safe business proposition. That is one function which beef cattle perform 

 that we very frequently overlook. 



As a man increases his land holdings, no matter how profitable the 

 production of poultry, hogs or dairy products may be, he is unable to 

 extend his business in proportion to his extension in land. A man can 

 direct and operate a larger farm, a larger body of land, he can handle, 

 operate and direct the investment of a larger amount of capital in beef 

 cattle and in land than he can in any other combination that I know of 

 with agriculture as its basis. 



It is not the man who owns the largest herd of cattle, or the man 

 who feeds the largest number of cattle, that is usually the most efficient 

 cattle man. We find that as a general rule a comparatively small farmer 

 who can look after his own herd, who can personally suprevise the feeding 

 of his cattle if he does not do it himself, is the man who usually is most 

 successful in the development of a beef cattle industry in the community. 



That is illustrated on the Kansas City market very nicely. During the 

 past year I happen to be acquainted personally with five men and know their 

 herds fairly well, who at one time or another during the year placed a new 

 top on the Kansas City market; first in June, then in July, la'er in August, 

 and finally twice in November, when the last of the five sold a carload of 

 Shorthorn cattle for $12.75 per hundred, which I believe was the highest 

 price paid on the open markets in the United States for cattle during the 

 year 1921, disregarding show cattle. In every instance the cat'le which per- 

 formed this market topping 'stunt', as we call it, were proiuced and fed 

 on the farms from which they were shipped. There was never an expense 



