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VII. THE FEED INDUSTRY OF THE UNITED STATES

"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)