Recent experiences will impel some producers to curtail or discontinue their operations temporarily, but others will take their places and quantity of production will be maintained while quality will be increased.
High-priced land, grain and labor will compel stockmen to grade up their herds, to discriminate more closely in the purchase of feeding stock, to improve feeding methods and to keep exact records of costs. For at the higher level of costs and values all around, as compared with prewar times, both the risks and rewards of the business will be greater.
As co-operative activities are extended among producers, it may be found advisable for livestock associations to employ expert buyers at the various markets whose duty shall be the filling of orders for association members, for the choice of feeders cannot be safely based on personal fancy. The only true guide is unbiased judgment as to what the market demands in the finished product and what type of feeding cattle will yield the result.
An experienced buyer of keen judgment, constantly in touch with the market, should prove as valuable to producers as the expert buyer of fat cattle is to the packer.
Such expert selection of feeders would take the guesswork out of the first and most important step in feeding.
Generally speaking, the consumers’ demand is constantly for better meats from comparatively young animals. Taking the situation the country over with present prices of feed stuffs considered, it has been found that beef cattle make most money for the producer if not held past the age of two years. But there is no hard-and-fast rule for the guidance of every individual producer; the heavy, well-finished cattle always bring high prices. Only by keeping an accurate feeding record can the producer decide for himself what policy is most advantageous in his case, or determine when his steers stop making sufficient gains to compensate him for the feed required.
Armour’s 1919 Livestock Purchases
RISING prices of farm land and feed have changed entirely the character of livestock received on the market as compared to twenty years ago. The period following the war shows all conditions more or less accentuated, and one can trace very definitely the tendency to market animals younger and to feed to lesser ripeness than prevailed in the earlier years of the last decade. In 1919 Armour and Company purchased 12,235,451 head of livestock, while in 1918 they purchased 11,398,131. Yet the animals bought last year weighed actually fewer pounds, in spite of their greater numbers, than those received the year preceding; the former weight being 3,740,347,223 pounds and the latter 3,939,278,534 pounds. Furthermore, the animals of 1919 cost over nineteen million dollars more. The following table presents these facts on a percentage basis: