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considered to be lightweight beef, meaning under one thousand pounds live weight. This trend was very gradual because people’s living habits still required a great deal of physical effort and hard food was still cherished and soft diets had not become the order of the day. Big steers and big-steer operators still enjoyed the major portion of the demand for beef. With much promotion on the part of cattle feeders and cattle breeders, baby beef began to make some inroads on the big-beef market. Land was continually increasing in value and the breaking up of large ranches had begun in an almost unnoticed way.
    By the late 1920’s production costs had begun to make it less profitable to keep steers and other beef animals until they were several years old. Most of the people in America had begun to ride in automobiles and were burning less protein foods, and lightweight cattle had gotten into major demand. The crash of 1929 broke the buying power of the purchasing public and a cut off of a small beef was far more in reach of the average consumer and the luxury living class of Americans that had insisted on and demanded big finished beef was dwindling to a very small number. Big steers broke just about all the cattlemen that were specializing in them alone, and the cattle producers that survived had to change their operations to lightweight beef; the demand for baby beef and veal, which is a sucking calf that weighs less than 300pounds, comprised most of the beef-tonnage turnover.
    Young cattle in their growing years do not put on enough tallow under most grazing operations to produce a good quality of meat when slaughtered. The cry for quality at light weight stimulated the cattle-feeding business because young cattle had to be confined in feed lots on concentrated feed grains and protein such as cottonseed meal, soybean meal, etc., in order to fatten in spite of their growing age.
    Cattlemen had been improving the fleshing qualities of their breeding stock for several generations and the so-called beef specialists from our various agricultural universities sponsored and demanded in the show ring a lightweight, heavy-fleshed, highly finished young animal and brought on the feeding and exhibiting of baby beef animals by our boys and girls that were studying animal husbandry and agriculture at all levels of education. Breeders, in order to satisfy the modern demand, were forced to breed square, blocky,’ short-legged, heavy-fleshed cattle that in reality and fact were less adaptive to the cattle grass ranches of the range country, and cattle of such conformation would naturally produce less milk for their offspring.
    This trend for compact, smooth, showy feeder cattle in the course of twenty-five years has almost destroyed the practical purposes of large livestock in that, with their lack of milk and their burdensome conformation, such cattle are not capable of foraging over a wide range making a living as well as producing a big calf. I well remember when the first beef specialists were sent out to advise cattlemen as to how to improve and breed smooth,typy, modern beef cattle. Before this time when we rode on a roundup it was necessary to ride to the top of the mountains, the bottom of the canyons, and the furthermost corners of a big pasture because range cattle then would be scattered and taking the best advantage of the most country within a fenced pasture, regardless of how large the pasture might be. Within three or four generations of crossing our good native range cattle with European breeds of bulls, I began to notice, as a cowboy and by then a rancher, that cattle didn’t graze as far up the mountain or as far from water and that range cows seldom ever had enough milk, that one had to be roped and milked when the calf was small to keep her bag from spoiling.
    By the early 1950’s this clamor for baby beef, short, compact breeding stock, and from using the advice of educated specialists, cattle were so greatly improved