5G2 ANNUAT. REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



faster than she ought I cut down or if losing flesh I add a little fat 

 to the food. 



PROF. VAN NOKMAN: 1 would like to add to this discussion a 

 little bit by cnipliasizing two* or (hree things in connection with 

 this discussion cm ihe cost of milk production. It was brought out 

 right here this morning and it is brought out repeatedly in dillerent 

 meetings 1 have been to and by diflerent men I have met, that when 

 you find a man who don't spend all his time with a sickle, shovel 

 and pitchfork, who is not kukiug about the high cost of milk and 

 no protit in farming, he is gelling some accurate figures. You find 

 a man that has demonstrated that lu^ can produce at a profit. The 

 lesson 1 get out of that is this: that ilie (mly salvation for the dairy- 

 man today is for him to be so constituted that he will get accurate 

 figures on what he is doing. If he is so constituted that he cannot 

 get figures I see absolutely no hope for him. i»ccause I never yet heard 

 in meeting or out of meeting, of a man liiai has been making a big 

 profit who cannot give figures. One of the things we learn in the 

 educational work is to think, and I find that the fellow who ^Idnks 

 can argue forward or backward from a given point anr' : argue 

 this way, that tlie men who are making money always ii^ve figures 

 and the fellow that cannot make money rarely has fgures. There 

 must be some relation between figures and money, and I say the 

 only salvation I see is for the men who are getting at this thing is 

 to figure. When he does get to figuring he is going to find out a 

 few things. One of them is that some of his good cows are only 

 giving from 3,000 to 4,000 pounds of milk a year and there is no 

 question about it Ihat you cannot make a profit on a cow that gives 

 but 3,000 pounds of milk a year, in any market in Pennsylvania to- 

 day. There are not many in the State of Pennsylvania having a few 

 cows producing 4,000 pounds of milk a year can make a profit on 

 those cows if they charge up the labor. 



The other thing was hinted at but not emphasized as I hoped. 

 One said that it cost very little more to produce a crop of silage 

 that produced twenty tons per acre than it did to grow one that 

 produced but ten tons. In that truth, gentlemen, is the foundation 

 of profit in all farming, and in the feeding of the cow. It takes the 

 first tons of silage to pay for the labor and it is not until you get 

 more tons of silage to the acre than will pay for the labor of grow- 

 ing the corn that there is any profit in silage ,and the same is true 

 of the cow. It is not until she has produced milk enough to pay for 

 the feed and labor and interest that there is any profit in the milk, 

 and that takes more than 4,000 pounds. A representative of the 

 Borden's Condensed Milk Company recently told me that they have 

 figures of the milk production of over 4,000 farms in the State of 

 New York. I think it was for the last twenty years. They know 

 how many cows have been kept on those farms; they know what the 

 average production per cow per farm is on the farm that supply 

 them. That is the way the Borden Company makes money, by hav- 

 ing the figures and knowing what they are doing. They know their 

 business and their farmers' business. Not only are they able to fix 

 the prices but see what the farmer can do because they know more 

 about it than the farmer himself. They see that on those farms 



