go agricuIvTure; of maine. 



your product in sweet cream removes a considerable portion of 

 the difficulty and labor of handling the product. Perhaps it 

 might interest you to give a few moments to the dairy problem 

 particularly as I see it in our region. That is primarily a dairy 

 region. In the older days the most of the butter was made in 

 summer and stored and marketed late in the fall. In those days 

 the wife made the butter. The milk was set in the old way, 

 in pans in cellars, and the quality of the butter was good. It 

 seems to me that the average dairy as we see it there, gives very 

 little profit. I have looked at it from a number of ways, and it 

 seems to me that there is comparatively little profit to be gotten 

 out of it. In the first place, there are heavy items of expense, 

 beginning with the purchased feed, which has grown to be more 

 and more a heavy expense in the dairy line. It is not so very 

 long ago that our farmers were not accustomed to buy feed to 

 supplement what was produced on the farm. They expected 

 to keep only so much stock as could be fed from what the farm 

 produced. But now we must go into the market and buy from 

 the West supplementary feed and I fancy if we were to sit down 

 sometimes and carefully compare the cost of those feeds with 

 the income from the product we are getting, we should surprise 

 ourselves. What was left would be in many of the average 

 dairies altogether too small a margin. Then there is a heavy 

 investment. We can start an orchard on comparatively poor 

 land and get good returns. But if we will succeed in dairying 

 we must have expensive buildings, we must have good cows. 

 Now the trouble with the average dairying lies largely in the 

 fact that there are so many poor cows. It is partly the cow and 

 partly the conditions. Many a cow is in result a poor cow which 

 would be a good cow if she were handled rightly. Also, we 

 need expensive machinery. The whole line of investment is an 

 expensive one. That investment means interest, it means depre- 

 ciation. We must take 5 per cent for our interest, at least five 

 per cent for insurance on the buildings. The depreciation on 

 the cow was emphasized last night by Prof. Beach. Then there 

 is the labor item. Perhaps there is no line of farming in which 

 the labor is heavier than in the dairy line. There is the milking 

 which comes so constantly, and then with us oftentimes the dis- 

 posing of the milk is a very serious affair. I live in a region 

 where there is a skimming station. The common experience 



