DRY-FARMING CONGRESS, WICHITA, 1914 



51 



The cooperation of these Western states will bring all this about. You 

 cannot produce your 8 million bushels of wheat in one county here or 200 

 million bushels in this state without helping us. We cannot produce our 

 20 or 30 millions of precious metals each year without helping you, and in 

 the encouragement of one or the other, we are helping each other and 

 helping both and so it matters not whether the production of that dollar's 

 worth of wealth is in my state or in yours, it helps us all. In a great 

 country like ours, everything we do to build up is helping us all. 



Out in our state we have a population of less than a million. We have 

 more natural resources to the square mile than has the state of Massachu- 

 setts. We are better located and yet if we were populated to the same 

 extent as Massachusetts, we would have more than 40 million people. We 

 find on investigations at home that only about 8 percent of the territory 

 of Colorado h^s been developed at all and no percent is as developed as it 

 should be. 



Just think of the possibilities there are in this Western country! But 

 the thing we have always lacked in the West has been the union of effort. 

 That has been the trouble with us. We, have had each state struggling 

 along, something as rivals, and no two of them working absolutely in 

 harmony for the upbuilding of this great Western empire of ours. We 

 want these lands put in the hands of actual settlers and we want in our 

 state to have them in the hands of actual settlers in such quantities that 

 will enable each to make a living on a livestock basis. 



This is a new country. Our state is only a little over three dozen 

 years old. All of the institutions we have built have been constructed 

 within that time, and what we must have is that all the property within 

 that state, no matter what it is, shall be placed on the taxroll, and yet we 

 have built, out there, 15 million dollars worth of state institutions, and 

 today we have but little more than one-quarter of the property of the 

 state on the taxroll. 



We have learned one lesson from that, even in dry-farming, and that 

 is that livestock must take some part of the settlement and development 

 of that country. Out in western Colorado since the silo has come, they are 

 becoming more prosperous — they are all making some money. In that 

 country they were keeping hogs or cattle and selling their crops in the fall 

 each year, and then they changed to the small farm basis and then they 

 began dairying. There is more livestock in that county today than there 

 was before the land was cut up and there is dairying on almost every farm 

 in that county, and commencing with that time there has been an accumu- 

 lation of funds, so that almost everyone has a surplus in the bank and 

 new houses have been built, etc. It is a mistaken idea that the whole 

 country must be kept for vast pastures. In 1899 Colorado had great cattle 

 herds and vast ranches and the output was 16 million dollars. Last year, 

 with the breaking up of all the ranches, feeding better in the winter, taking 

 better care of livestock, etc., the output was 48 million dollars. 



We have heard a great deal in these modern times of conservation. I 

 am willing to talk about conservation wtih the idea or utilization of waste. 



