398 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



reasonable exposures and blame the manufacturer for any failure 

 to get the best results. When we see plows and harrows and rakes 

 and mowing machines and reapers and threshing machines and all 

 kinds of farm implements standing out all winter, exposed to all 

 kinds of weather, we are not surprised that this greatest of all 

 machines on the farm, the dairy cow, is in many instances un- 

 protected. 



When you have become convinced of the inestimable value of 

 the dairy cow as a machine and realize how delicate and intricate 

 a piece of machinery she is and realize what it costs to abuse her, 

 then her care and support will regulate itself, for it will become 

 a business proposition. The man who thinks it is economy to 

 feed his cow the cheapest feed and provide for her the cheapest 

 place, and who constantly shocks her sensitive nature by loud talk- 

 ing and abusive language, will find there is nothing in it. 



For a half a century she has stood at your door and offered 

 the highest price for grain of any market, and she is only a 

 machine. 



This wonderful, moving, living, breathing, active piece of 

 mechanism commenced her mission at Plymouth Rock, and tied 

 behind the dust-covered emigrant wagon she has followed man to 

 the setting sun. She endured all of the hardships of the pioneer 

 and on her march she picked the straws that blew her way and 

 converted them into milk to fill the breast of her who rocked the 

 cradle and fed the babe, and she is only a machine. When the 

 grasshoppers and the hot winds and the chinch bugs and hail storms 

 and cyclones destroyed the crops in Kansas and Nebraska, she 

 chased the Russian thistle and from it she manufactured the high- 

 est-priced commodity from the farm and made it possible for the 

 early settler to stay, turning adversity into prosperity, appeasing 

 hunger, changing discontent to content — and she is only a machine. 

 When the wheat crop of Wisconsin and Minnesota failed and the 

 farms were mortgaged and father and mother, whose children 

 were scattered, bowed down with the weight of years, looked back 

 over years of toil and trembled as they contemplated losing their 

 home, it was then this queen of mortgage lifters, the dairy cow, 

 held out the olive branch. It was accepted and the mortgage was 

 paid. The home was saved, misery was turned into happiness and 

 as the smoke from the burning mortgages ascended to Heaven, 

 Wisconsin swore allegiance to the dairy cow, and she is only a 

 machine. 



