FIFTY-SECOND ANNUAL CONVENTION 25 



No, because if we study experiments that have been car- 

 ried on, if you feed old oats to a cow twenty-five per cent 

 of them passes through her undigested. Moreover, oats and 

 corn will not make a balanced ration. You have got to go 

 into the market and buy some feed rich in proteins: oil 

 meal, cottonseed meal, blood meal, in order to provide pro- 

 tein that cows must have to produce profitable flows of 

 milk. 



Why not grow some alfalfa hay in these corn sections? 

 We are selling it from our barn today at twenty-two dol- 

 lars a ton. Instead of Virginia or the southern farmer pay- 

 ing twenty-five to thirty dollars a ton, why are not they 

 growing some legumes? They can. 



It reminds me of a little incident I ran on to in Minne- 

 sota. It was when people were very much excited about 

 building an export corporation. This farmer raised barley. 

 He lives in Goodhue County. I went out to his farm; he 

 had sold barley the year before at $22.50. And he said 

 to me, ''there is no money in raising grain at that PRICE. 

 We are going to the bad." I said to him, *'You are a good 

 farmer to raise barley at fifty cents a bushel, aren't you?" 

 He showed me three carloads of alfalfa hay that he had 

 brought in at the station, from out west, in Idaho, which 

 was costing him laid down at his station twenty-five dol- 

 lars a ton. I said, ''Why are you buying this alfalfa hay, 

 bringing it in from the west at twenty-five dollars a ton 

 when the experiment station has planted some plats on 

 your land and without treatment your soil the first crop 

 produced one and a half tons of hay, and on treatment with 

 lime it produced two tons, and when treated with phos- 

 phate it had grown still more? You can produce four tons 

 or better this year, on these plats of twenty acres." He 

 said that he could. "Then," I said, "you go out into Idaho 

 and buy alfalfa and pay twenty-five dollars a ton for hay, 

 when you can grow four tons of it to the acre, or get one 

 hundred dollars an acre, bringing you an income from your 

 land?" "Sure." "Then why don't you raise your three 

 carloads of alfalfa instead of buying it?" 



I can take you up and down this whole United States 



