DAIRY MEETING. 22/ 



REMARKS 



By J. D. McEdwards. 



I have attended all these dairy meetings since the first, 

 twelve years ago. I have been a member of the association 

 and have left my business and come here to learn the things 

 about which we are talking. It is very interesting to me. 

 I never come to one of these meetings but I go home bene- 

 fited and amply repaid for the sacrifice that I have made. I 

 see a great change since I came to the State in 1895. Then the 

 creameries were taking cream by the old inch system. I re- 

 member the last month that we ran on the inch system. We 

 were running one little factory and we ran behind $300. We 

 saw that we could not do business in that way so we introduced 

 the Babcock test. Then there was a great howl. Nobody knew 

 anything about the Babcock test. The patrons said it wasn't 

 any good, anyway, and the man who ran it did not know his 

 business. We had all those things to contend with, but we found 

 it was the proper way to pay for cream. We went from the 

 inch system, the spacing, to the weighing of the cream, and I am 

 proud to say that I helped to formulate the bill presented to the 

 legislature with regard to weighing the cream instead of spac- 

 ing it. We had another time with our patrons but we found out 

 that that was the proper way to do, to weigh the cream and test 

 it and test our samples by weight. We find that we are pro- 

 gressing as creamerymen and also as dairymen. We try to 

 keep the confidence of our patrons by loaning them small test- 

 ers. We always have from two to a dozen testers around among 

 our patrons, because we found that if they sent a sample to a 

 competing creamery sometimes the sample was not the same as 

 the one we had taken, and confusion resulted. We also asked 

 them to send a sample to the State College. We find that the 

 clearer we can get the farmers to understand how our business 

 is conducted the more successful we can be. We have confi- 

 dence in them and try to keep their confidence. When I first 

 started in the business, 22 years ago, we thought the less the 

 farmers knew about the business the better we got along, but 

 we have found out since that that was a wrong idea. I have 



