AYRSHIRE BREEDING. 143 



Qtiestion. How about Hungarian? 



Mr. BowDiTCH. It will produce more milk than butter, but is an 

 excellent fodder. 



Question. We understand you are making butter for a fancy 

 market and at a high price, so you can afford to be particular 

 about the feed of your cattle. Now, we down here in Maine are 

 making butter for thirty-five or forty cents a pound. Would it be 

 advisable for us to sacrifice cotton seed, wheat bran, ensilage and 

 the coarser farm products and feed your more particular rations 

 with the possibility' of securing the higher prices which you obtain? 



Mr. BowDiTCH. By no manner of means. 



Question. Is there an unlimited market for the higher priced 

 butter which you are making? 



Mr. BowDiTCH. It is limited. The whole butter market has 

 changed within the last twenty years. Twenty years ago it was the 

 custom for people to buy their butter in the fall, having it laid down, 

 and keep it all winter. Now butter comes into the market within 

 a week certainly of the time the milk is drawn from the cow, and 

 nowadays the}' buy but ten pounds where they used to buy two or 

 three hundred pounds at a time. The whole system has changed. 

 There does not seem to be any limit to the amount of butter that is 

 wanted at the price of forty cents, more or less. 



. AYRSHIRE BREEDING. 



By Prof. James Cheesman, Boston. 



Few of us can recall an}' period in the breeders' experience more 

 Interesting than the present, and none when the breeders' art 

 demanded greater knowledge and larger courage than in our time. 

 Of all the breeds of dairy cattle, the Aj'rshire is one of the few 

 which has not been injured by booming, high pressure tests for milk 

 or butter, or for elbowing out all competitors. If the Ayrshire has 

 escaped these vices it is largely owing to the fact that her owners 

 are plain, matter-of-fact farmers, working their cows for a living. 

 She has progressed slowly, but none the less surely, because she 

 has lived a rather isolated life of self-confidence in the memory of 

 past deeds. The influence of the Ayrshire in the development of 

 American dairying has been so pronounced that all the best known 



