22 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



great majority of us are just the common kind. We have to 

 learn what we know and it is much better to learn this from 

 the experience of others than from our own. It costs too 

 much to learn by experience. 



Take a good dairy paper, have the dairy bulletins from the 

 Experiment Station and the Agricultural Department, get right 

 yourself and then keep good dairy cows and you will be well 

 started in the business. 



The greatest improvement in Maine in the quality of the 

 cows has been in the localities where there are cow test asso- 

 ciations. We expect to organize two more in the near future. 

 I wish it were possible for every dairyman in Maine to be a 

 member of one of these associations. Grade up the herds by 

 using bulls of the same breed from good families ; do not 

 change every few years from one breed to another. The farm- 

 ers of Maine in all other branches of farming will have the 

 most improved machinery and that is right, but when it comes 

 to the cow, the most important of all the machinery to manu- 

 facture the raw material raised on the farms into the finished 

 product, milk and cream, in many instances they show bat 

 little interest in the kind they keep. It would be just as busi- 

 nesslike for a farmer to try to raise potatoes with the machine.'^ 

 used twenty-five years ago as it is for the dairyman to try to 

 make milk and cream with the old native cow or a cow not of 

 the dairy type. 



Perhaps it would be well to take a brief review of the work 

 for the past year. I was appointed to this office March i, 

 1913, and soon afterward the work of the Seed Improvement 

 Association was put in charge of this department. C. R. Le- 

 land, the Assistant Dairy Instructor, who is also the Secretai'v 

 of the Seed Improvement Association, will report this part of 

 the work. 



Some of the first meetings I attended after coming into the 

 office were meetings of the cow test associations. After attend- 

 ing a few of these meetings I became stronger in my convic- 

 tions that the best kind of work for the immediate future would 

 be to assist the associations already doing business and try to 

 organize some new ones. With this end in view, I corres- 

 ponded with the Dairy Bureau at Washington. D. C. Mr. A. 

 M. Goodman of that Department came to Maine the first of 



