68 Missouri Agricnltural Report. 



WHAT I HAVE LEARNED FROM 3,000 YEARS OF PER- 

 SONAL EXPERIENCE WITH A COW (30 YEARS 

 WITH 100 COWS.) 



(By Hon. H. B. Gurler, De Kalb, 111.) 



Mr. Chairman, Ladies' and Gentlemen : I am glad to be with 

 you again. I was talking yesterday but had to saw right off in 

 order to make room for somebody else. I think we ought all to 

 feel mighty good this morning after feeding on that red roan steer 

 last night, and the dairymen ought to get a lot of satisfaction out 

 of it, if it is true, as I am told, that they actually fed that steer on 

 the milk of a Jersey cow. Now if a shorthorn steer is allowed to 

 nurse on a Jersey cow, and if you cannot get fine beef that way, I 

 don't know how to get it. 



I never had any finer beef, and I awoke this morning feel- 

 ing mighty good. I got a good night's sleep last night, and I feel 

 like working this morning. At home, lots of my friends say it is 

 so long since they have seen me work, that they have forgotten that 

 I ever did, when the fact is, I v/as once one of the hardest workers 

 on the farm. 



Babcock test — I gave yesterday a brief account of my early 

 experience at testing cows. We had no Babcock test then. We 

 used first a percentage glass and found the percentage of cream, 

 and then we churned the cream from the milk, and I followed that 

 up with my dairy, having some forty cows and having it all to do 

 myself, and brought the thing up to the time the Babcock test came 

 into use, and that simplified matters tremenduously. It cut the 

 labor twenty times in two and was fully as accurate as the old way. 

 I had worked many years trying to build up my herd, and I was 

 always finding out something new. 



Abortion — I remember how surprised I was down in Pennsyl- 

 vania when I heard Dr. Pearson describe contagious abortion. It 

 was a revelation to me. I remember how I doubted it. I was 

 so skeptical I said to Dr. Pearson, "Do you believe that is so," right 

 on top of his lecture. But I was convinced, and went home and 

 on the strength of what he had said, the next time contagious abor- 

 tion started in my dairy herd, I knew just what to do. The first 

 cow that aborted, I isolated her, and every cow that aborted from 

 that time on, went to the stable over across the road, away from the 

 herd, and then I cleaned everything up where she had been. 



