As the remarkable corn-growing possibilities of the soil and 

 climate in the corn belt became more and more evident and the 

 demand for corn grew greater, the westward movement of agri- 

 culture naturally stimulated the growing of corn and, to a cor- 

 responding degree, diminished the area of grazing land. Grad- 

 ually, but surely, the plow drove out the cow until in the heart 

 of the corn country but few females of the beef type remained, 

 For thirty years or more in some such sections, it has been a 

 proverb that "it does not pay to keep a cow a year for the chance 

 of a calf." 



At the same time that conditions within the corn belt were 

 tending to reduce the rearing of beef cattle there, the industry 

 was extending on the great breeding ground of the Southwest and 

 the grazing lands of the West (see Circular No. 169). Thus an 

 increasing supply of cheap stockers and feeders from the range 

 was a further large factor in causing the abandonment 

 of cattle raising by many farmers, who reasoned and logically 

 so that calves could be produced and grown more econom- 

 ically on the cheap grass lands of the West than on corn-belt 

 farms. Moreover, the attractive opportunities which the range 

 country offered the cattleman induced many live-stock farmers 

 of the Mississippi valley to migrate west, thus diminishing still 

 further the proportion of cattle feeders to grain growers in the 

 central states. 



The extent to which this change in conditions has affected 

 beef production is indicated somewhat accurately by the results 

 of inquiries that have been made on an extensive scale among 

 cattle feeders of Illinois and Indiana. In 1902 this experiment 

 station secured reports of methods used by 509 cattle feeders in 

 Illinois, and found that only 12 percent raised their entire supply 

 of feeding cattle. 1 It was estimated that only about 15 percent of 

 the native steers marketed in Chicago from Illinois were carried 

 from birth to maturity without changing hands. 2 



The Indiana Experiment Station in 1906 investigated the 

 methods of 929 cattle feeders in Indiana, and reported that "only 

 6 percent are really beef producers, that is, breeding their own 



1 111. Agr. Exp. Sta., Circ. No. 88, p. 1. 



2 111. Agr. Exp. Sta. Circ. No. 79, p. 6. 



