Pigs and chickens, how to select the stock, how to feed them and house them were treated in the same manner by other speakers from the school. I was surprised in how scientific a manner this business has been worked out. Take for example the matter of the by-product, manure. One speaker made the statement--it sounded rash enough but he assured us that it was based on statistics--that the annual loss in America through the incompetent handling of barnyard dressing, amounted to six hundred million dollars. This represents just so much wasted nitrogen, phosphoric acid and potash. One speaker presented a table showing the value in dollars and cents of dressing per one thousand pounds, live weight. Sheep produce thirty-four and one-tenth pounds per day, valued at twenty-six dollars a year; calves sixty-seven and eight-tenths, valued at twenty-four dollars a year; pigs eighty-three and six-tenths, valued at sixty dollars a year; cows seventy-four and one-tenth pounds, valued at twenty-nine dollars and twenty-seven cents a year; horses forty-eight and eight-tenths pounds, valued at twenty-seven dollars and seventy-four cents a year. And this is merely a by-product. I tell you those figures did us good. Those of us who were in the habit of holding our breath in awe at mention of the capitalization of the steel trust, held up our heads and felt more like men when we realized that we were in a sense stockholders in a business that put that trust completely in the shade. For example, the annual production of eggs in the United States is about 1,293,800,000 dozens. At the average price of eggs the total value of these is $452,830,000--nearly five hundred million dollars a year. Added to this, more than two hundred million dollars’ worth of poultry is consumed. And this is only one item. Consider that in the State of Wisconsin alone the value of the butter and cheese products for a single year runs over eighty million dollars; consider that the wheat crop is worth annually considerably over a billion; that vegetables alone represent another annual value of over two hundred and fifty million and you get some idea of what a business the same farmer who is laughed at in the comic weeklies is doing. The crop for the year nineteen hundred amounted to more than three billion dollars. And that represents without a doubt another three billion of waste, for there isn’t a nation on the face of the earth that so uneconomically plants and reaps and markets its harvest. Why shouldn’t we farmers carry ourselves proudly? Why instead of being the butt and plaything of financiers shouldn’t we hold those same men at our mercy? These were questions that before the winter was out more than one man asked of himself.