DAIRY MKE^TING. Ill 



iicially, but we can increase and help it along very much by our 

 intelligent feed and care, and that is something we want to do. 



Now, what are your herds averaging? Any man who has a 

 .herd that gives 4,000 pounds of milk ought not to be satisfied. 

 He should set the standard a little higher the next year, and 

 when he has reached that, the following year he should raise 

 it a little more. A man told me he had a cow that would give 

 a fraction over twenty-two pounds of butter in seven days. I 

 said, "If you had a herd that would do that you would be satis- 

 fied." He said no, he would want to get it up a little higher. 

 Every man has a few animals that excel, but the trouble is that 

 he does not know which they are. Now, weed out the poor 

 ■ones. Raise your own calves. If you buy them of some other 

 man you pay for his education and brains, to get your herd up 

 to a higher standard. 



In reference to the feeding of the cows, 1 believe that in the 

 dairy business the sooner we cut ofif the feed bills we are paying 

 to the western dealers the better. The nearer we can live with- 

 in ourselves the better. The more food we can raise on our 

 •own farms, that is adapted for milk production, the better. 

 That leads me to say, if we are going to raise our own feed, 

 we must have a short rotation of crops best adapted 

 to feeding the dairy cow for the production of milk. And 

 I say unhesitatingly, if a man is to do that, the rotation of 

 crops will be clover, corn, oats and peas ; a three-years rota- 

 lion. With these crops a man can run his herd and go into 

 the market and buy very, very little grain, and that only 

 ■of the most concentrated sort, worth almost as much as a fer- 

 tilizer to spread on the land as it costs as a food. I suppose 

 most of you are raising those three things. It is a common 

 practice in our own state for a man to seed down to clover, and 

 then he will say that the clover runs out. His idea seems to 

 "be to keep the land in grass as long as he can, until it cuts only 

 half a ton to the acre, and then turn it over. Friends, that is 

 all wrong. The Lord made the clover plants to run out. Your 

 ■corn runs out. No clover ever comes in except from the seed, 

 "hence it does run out : and when it runs out, if a man is keeping 

 dairy cattle he does not want to depend on timothy hay if he 

 ■can get clover. I was telling a gentleman on the train this 



