"Sixty years ago (1853) there was no knowledge of scientific feeding
in the United States. Sixty years ago there was no feed industry in
the United States. Thirty years ago (1883) the teaching of scientific
feeding in the United States began. Thirty years ago the feed industry
in the United States began. When I say that sixty years ago there was
no feed industry in the United States, I mean that there was no feed
industry such as we of the present day apply to the term. At that
time, the population of the United States was only one-fourth what it
is today. The problem of feeding domestic animals, as well as human
beings, was simplicity itself, in fact it was not a problem. We had
more land than we knew what to do with. The owner of livestock raised
more grain and more hay and had more pasturage than he had animals to
consume or than he had a market for. Domestic animals were fed on the
natural grains and hays, grown upon the same farms as themselves. The
city or town owner of horses or livestock bought his feed stuffs mostly
direct from the farmer who grew them. By-product materials of the
greatest feeding value, while produced in far smaller quantities than
at the present day, were not sufficiently appreciated nor sufficiently
needed to cause the farmer to make the effort to haul them from the
mill or factory to his farm, much less to buy them. Scientific feeding
with a knowledge of the balanced ration had not as yet been taught in
our state universities. The value of grinding the natural grains was
only slightly understood and was practiced only in a very limited way
by a few of the more progressive and thoughtful feeders. Flour mills
experienced the greatest difficulty in finding a market for their bran
and middlings. While these by-products were probably the first to be
recognized as of great feeding value, yet hundreds of thousands of tons
were sold for a few dollars a ton, or burned, or run into streams,
for there was no market. Cottonseed meal as a feeding stuff was at
that time unknown. Holes were dug into the ground at the cotton gins
and the seed was buried as a means of getting rid of it. Distillers'
and brewers' grains, starch factory by-products, molasses, oatmeal
by-products, oat clippings, and many others were frequently piled up on
vacant lots to decay or run into the streams, or given to such farmers
as could be induced to haul them away, and the earliest practical use
of them was by the manufacturers who fed cattle with them in their
wet or underground state at the factories. No attempt was made to dry
them or put them into form to be utilized commercially. Instead of
being sources of great revenue to the manufacturer, they were, in many
instances, the cause of great expense. Because of the waste and expense
and the low prices realized, the cost of the main products--the food
for human beings--was very greatly increased."[39]
"Here is a fact worth careful noting, that in these days of close
competition, every cent realized for a by-product is credited to
the cost of producing the main product--the human food--and that in
addition to itself being converted into additional food for man, that
is, into meat, dairy products, poultry, eggs, etc., its sale operates
directly in a very large way as a saving to the consumer upon the
main product from which it is derived. In other words, there is only
one profit figured, and that is upon the main product--the food for
man--the by-product being figured solely as such, sold for what it will
bring, and the returns credited to the cost in figuring cost prices for
the main product.
"The problem of feeding the world--much less the problem of feeding
the people of the United States--had not as yet commenced to trouble
the scientist, the statesman, or the business man of the day. No one
expected that in the short space of sixty years, all of our available
lands would be occupied and that our population would have increased
from 31,000,000 to 91,000,000 people, and that the problem of the
cost of living, the cost of food, would, during the lives of people
then living, be the thought and problem uppermost in the minds of
our people. That this is the thought uppermost in the minds of our
population today is evidenced by the daily conversations of our
friends, by what we read in the newspapers, and by the action of
Congress and our National Government in providing a commission for
investigation of its cause."
The following data was taken from the Statistical Report of the
Illinois State Board of Agriculture, December 1, 1913,--(Assessor's
Reports)
_Illinois Pasture Lands_