The Dawn of a New Constructipe Era 27 



Sheep Raising 



not sell him a farm too small. I notice some of the cut-over 

 land owners are cutting their lands up in parcels which, on the 

 very face of the thing, are too small to enable the man to make a 

 decent living. The amount of income which a live stock farmer 

 can secure from an acre is limited by the number of cattle it will 

 support, and if you limit him to a certain number of acres his 

 aggregate income will not be sufficient to make him a decent 

 living, and then he will get discouraged. In the West and other 

 parts of the country we have found that you must have a size of 

 farm which is sufficient to give the farmer an aggregate income 

 which will enable him to operate profitably. So there is a place 

 for both the large and the medium-sized farmer. 



Not only cattle, but sheep, can be grown here economically, 

 and on some of the cut-over lands I have seen hogs which are and Forage 

 as fat as you could desire, in the middle of January — simply Crop Possibil- 

 rolling fat; and these hogs did not have the advantage of winter ities 

 green crops such as oats or crimson clover. 



The other utilization will be by means of crops. What can 

 we raise? We cannot raise, I believe, gentlemen, what might 

 be known as the foodstuff crops. If we attempt to raise wheat 

 and barley and products of that sort, which can be more eco- 

 nomically produced on better or richer lands elsewhere, we will 

 make a mistake ; but if we raise forage crops which are naturally 

 adapted to these cut-over lands, that is more apt to give you an 

 income. You can either feed them to the cattle or sell them, 

 and you have a ready money crop. Among those I might men- 

 tion the cow pea, lespedeza and various other legumes and 

 grasses which are already adapted for producing feed crops to 

 sell as hay or feed to your stock. If you desire to raise grain 

 crops, there are only two crops you can give consideration to — 

 oats and corn ; also, maybe some legumes or cow pea seed. Oats 

 and corn will probably be a fairly profitable crop ; oats is not very 

 profitable under the best of conditions, but it is probably better 

 than corn. In looking over the cut-over lands. I find corn is a 

 very light producer. We find there is a range of from fifteen to 

 thirty bushels per acre, and the lower yields seem to be more 

 common. Since most of the cut-over lands are hilly, or of a 

 broken character, it is questionable how economical it will be to 

 attempt to cultivate corn on lands of that character. This same 

 statement applies to cotton, which is a fairly profitable money crop 

 under favorable conditions. 



