ONE of the most significant and gratifying gains in the livestock business during the decade just past is the recognition of its financial soundness. This is reflected in the changed attitude of financiers and investors towards cattle paper. While a decade ago bankers in the great financial centers looked with suspicion upon such securities, now bankers and business men throughout the country purchase approximately $500,000,000 of cattle paper annually and regard it as among the safest investments.

Melvin A. Traylor, President of the First Trust and Savings Bank of Chicago, declares that “loans on livestock are the best of all investments,” and President Thos. P. Martin, of the Oklahoma Stock Yards Bank, Oklahoma City, agrees with him. This latter bank loaned $45,000,000 in seven years to cattle producers in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, only fifty dollars of the amount loaned being lost. It is doubtful if any other industrial securities could make a better or even an equal showing.

There is still some difficulty in arranging loans in some sections of the country, where bankers have not yet realized the changed conditions of the business and farmers have not given the proper emphasis to the improvement of livestock production. But generally speaking the cattle feeder with good judgment in the breeding and selection of feeders meets with no obstacles in financing his operations.

Most country bankers freely accept cattle paper because it is readily rediscounted in the country’s financial centers. But many of them urge the borrowing feeders to keep accounts and determine accurately their profits and losses.

This is to the interest of the feeder and the cattle industry as a whole. For if the business is ever to be placed on a cost-of-production basis for the reckoning of market prices, it must be done by an accumulation of thousands of actual tests in feeding practice. It is plain that each individual feeder could not set or ask a certain percentage of profit, since a poor judge of stock and a careless feeder would demand more for an inferior product than the more efficient feeder would ask for a better article.

The feasibility of any such scheme of regulating prices does not now appear, but it is clear in any case that each lot of cattle would have to be appraised at what their production ought to cost, considering quality, and not what it actually did cost.