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that during winter feeding time or during drought they would meet you in the flat part of the pasture between the windmill and the feed trough and, needless to say, the struggle to try to make money off of such unproductive cattle with the constantly climbing overhead put the cattle industry as a whole in the category of a poor business that for the most part had to be subsidized by oil wells or some other source of income derived from outside the livestock industry. Cattlemen that through their stubbornness had stayed with crossbreed cattle still had cows that produced milk and raised big calves. This sort of operator was ofttimes condemned by the brilliant, educated specialists of the animal kingdom because of his cattle’s lack of uniformity in color or some other characteristic thatwould not affect the weight of the cattle and would have no effect on the beef and, in fact, would be some criticism of no material consequence.
    By the beginning of the 1940’s the American way of life had been modified by modern conveniences, easy modes of travel and air conditioning, to where the human appetite rebelled at the taste of excessive tallow or other fats. The modern housewife began to demand lighter cuts of beef with enough finish to ensure flavor and easy preparation in cooking and at the same time that the meat be trimmed of all excessive tallow and other waste materials such as cartilage, excessive bone, and so forth.
    Tallow that is being trimmed from beef that sells for as much as a dollar a pound or more must be sold as waste for as little as seven cents a pound. This situation has caused packers to heavily penalize overfinished, over-fat cattle that carry too much tallow, and today’s trend in breeding cattle is to try to select breeding stock that will have a good growth factor and produce cattle that will gain economically to a point of light finish and will dress out with a minimum amount of waste with the maximum amount of red meat.
    Lightweight young beef will be softer, which in a sense may be considered more tender, and it is true that this kind of meat is juicier than some of the best beef from heavy cattle. This juice cooks out very fast and beef from young cattle shrinks extremely much in cooking as compared to beef from aged cattle. To those who know, the flavor and food value of meat from young lightweight cattle is far inferior to the high quality of beef from older cattle. However, it will be hard forpeople of this generation and generations to come to miss something they have never had.
    The next twenty years will be marked by numerous mistakes and failures before the ideal beef-type animal that is acceptable to the breeder, feeder, packer, and the housewife will be produced.

THE ONE
THAT
GOT AWAY

    I T WAS LATE SUMMER AND I HAD BEGUN to put some lightweight heifers in the feed lot to feed during the fall and winter months before and after school. This feed-lot deal of mine was not very big. I would feed forty or fifty head and send them to fortWorth in small truckloads as these certain individuals got fat enough to send to market. (About five cattle would fill a truck.)
    This was sort of a new trick in the cattle-feeding business. Anybody that had a feed lot close to the Fort Worth market could take advantage of using this trucking way of gettin’ cattle to town. By being able to send just a few head at a time, it was not necessary to overfeed the fattest ones waiting for the others to get fat enough to make up a full carload, and too, the same trucks could haul a few back from Fort Worth to go into the feed lot. It made the feeder’s operation a more continuous kind of turnover in the cattle-feeding business and gave a small feeder like me a chance to make a little more money.
    I had the east half of the old Lovelady Wagonyard in Weatherford leased for a feed lot. There was a short-haired cherry-red heifer in the last truckload of cattle that I had brought from Fort Worth. This little heifer refused