Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 20, Number 76, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 May 1899 — KANSAS CATTLE. [ARTICLE]

KANSAS CATTLE.

How the Sunflower State Farmer Turns His Corn to Profit. There are about 2,750,000 cattle in Kansas. Of these about 700,000 are milch cows, a similar number are working oxen, and the remainder, about 1,300,000, are being fattened for food, and at the proper season will be shipped to Kansas City, St. Joseph or Chicago to be slaughtered. Like every other human occupation, the catle trade is undergoing evolution. Experience is teaching new methods by which the greatest profit can be secured by the least outlay of labor and cost The breeding and fattening of live stock has been reduced to an exact science. There are three kinds of cattle, commercially speaking. The wild or range cattle, mixed cows and steers two years old, are bred in Texas and Indian Territory mostly, and shipped from Elgin and other points of lesser importance to the stock yards of Kansas City. There they are divded into canners, Stockers and feeders. Stockers are good breeding cows, which are sold and sent back to the farms of Kansas to multiply and replenish the barnyards. Feeders are steers that will be likely to take on flesh !f well fed, and are sent to the fattening farms, where for a short year they revel in luxury, and then pay the penalty at the butcher’s block. It has been found that 150 bushels of corn, more or less, will add 500 pounds of beef to the weight of the steer and increase his value from $lB or S2O to S4O or S6O. When a steer Is fattened be is usually sold by the pound according to the rates prevailing In the Kansas City and Chicago markets, somewhere between five and six cents a pound. The difference between the value of the raw material and that of the finished product, less the cost of 150 bushels of corn, is the profit of farmer. Canners are a low grade that are hard to fatten, and are not considered worthy of the honor of assisting to perpetuate their species. It is a case of the survival of the fittest, and they are sent to the executioner without further ceremony. The beef they have carried around on their bones goes to the factories to be canned, pickled, salted, smoked and canned in various forms and by various processes. —Chicago Record.