TiiiRTY-sixTK Annual 'Convention 977 



cows. That has got to come before we make any great progress 

 in improving the average dairy cow of this country. 



Hogs and poultry belong on the dairy farm. They till in be- 

 tween milkings. You can get more out of your labor if you have 

 hogs and poultry than if you have only cows. Good hogs and 

 good poultry should be combined with the dairy cow, and they 

 both bring good prices. You want these to feed the by-product, 

 skimmed milk, to if you sell the cream or make butter. 

 The experiment station values skimmed milk at 20 to 25 cents or 

 more per hundred pounds for feeding to common pigs and com- 

 mon calves for a common market. If you feed the skimmed milk 

 on the farm to stock which will bring an extra price, it is evidently 

 worth more. The more valuable your pigs and your calves, the 

 more valuable it is to you. I would not want to sell the skimmed 

 milk on any farm for $1 a hundred. I can make more by selling 

 the butterfat at the market price and feeding the skimmed milk 

 to dairy calves and bacon pigs. These are some indirect benefits 

 from dairy farming that ought to be taken into consideration, but 

 the aA^erage dairy farmer does not. He is simply looking for the 

 cash returns, the quick returns. 



There is no question but what we can keep up the fertility 

 of the soil a great deal easier with animal husbandry than without 

 it, although with commercial fertilizers we can keep up the 

 fertility without live stock. It can be done and will be done in 

 the future more than it is now. But we can keep it up easier and 

 better with live stock husbandry than we can without it. It is a 

 more simple proposition. If you get on the train and ride 

 from here to Michigan or through Wisconsin or the Great 

 N^orthwest, you do not have to ask when you come to dairy com- 

 munities. You can tell it by the crops and the looks of 

 the buildings. It is largely because they keep their land in 

 better mechanical condition, because they keep the carbon on the 

 farm and plow it down. When you get into a grain section where 

 their policy is to grow crops and sell from the farm to feed the 

 world they rob the soil of vegetal)le matter, get land in a poor me- 

 chanical condition, and after a while they cannot grow profitable 

 crops. When you incoroporate a certain amount of vegetable 

 matter you keep up the producing power largely because you have 

 kept up the physical condition. 



