162 ' ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



the daily cow. If your are a lover of that sleek, fat cow, I sug- 

 gest do not 'try your hand at dairying; better invest in race horses 

 or breed bulldogs, for she will eait you out of house and home 

 if you want to transpose her into a dairy cow. I repeat that it will 

 not pay to keep a 150 pound butter cow, but still I have the best 

 of reasons to believe that the average cow of Pennsylvania falls 

 below 150 pounds of butter per year. The man who is not willing 

 to sacrifice his liberty to the cow, to attend, yes, attend personally 

 to her every want and do it cheerfully and pleasantly had better de- 

 vote his time and land to some other line or specialty. (Our Na- 

 tional Department speaks highly of goat and skunk farming. This 

 is a mere suggestion as an outlet for some would-be but ver}' un- 

 successful dairymen). If a man needs a few bad dogs (good dogs 

 are dead dogs), and a few worse boys to drive his cows to and fro, 

 I am in serious doubt if his special forte is dairying. If a man, for 

 conscience sake, or any other constitutional reason, wishes to 

 avoid all labor on every holiday, legal or otherwise, noted and un- 

 noted in the calendar, that man wants to let dairying alone. The 

 dairy cow wants to be fed and watered every twelve hours, and 

 milked about that often, and that means 730 times a year; and the 

 man who is born tired will never make a good dairyman. 



THE cow. 



The next factor in the problem is the cow, possibly it is the biggest 

 factor. Not long ago a party remarked to me, "Lighty, any fool 

 could make money with cows that produce as much butter as yours 

 do." I could not tell if that was a right or left-handed compliment. 

 One of the greatest stumbling blocks for the would-be dairy farmers 

 of our country is the general purpose, and all-purpose cow combined. 

 They say, we will hit two birds with one shot, and shoot over the 

 whole tree; then exclaim, ''Do you see those feathers fly?" Yes; 

 they fly; and so do the birds. To make a long story short, the dairy 

 cow is one that has been trained from her youth up, has inherited 

 from many former generations the special power and capacity to 

 transform a large amount of cheap roughage grown on the farm into 

 good milk; in other words, she produces the maximum quantity of 

 good milk at the minimum cost to the dairvman. Find me a cow 

 that eats a large quantity of hay, silage, stover, etc., with an ap- 

 propriate proportion of grain, and then gives 40 to 60 pounds of 

 milk daily for 300 or more days in the year, and I will show you 

 every time a cow of a special type, a type built on dairy lines and a 

 cow that will not produce beef profitably, nor will her progeny. 

 These types, the dairy and beef, haA^e been discussed so fully and 

 so frequently that I will not weary you with a repetition. Dairying 

 with your beef bred cows is and must of necessity be a losing busi- 



