384 MISSOURI AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



The twenty million dollars we got for that creamery butter represents a 

 sum of money that our farmers made more than yours did last year. It 

 represents a sum of money that you might just as well have had if you 

 had milked as many cows and made as much butter as we did, and as you 

 might easily have done. 



The butter that a man makes is a net profit to him. Consider two 

 farmers situated exactly alike in every particular. They have the same 

 number of acres of land, the same number of cattle and hogs, the same 

 amount of machinery. They pursue tlieir farming operations exactly 

 alike, with one exception. It would seem that at the end of the year 

 each should have the same number of bushels of corn and tons of hay, that 

 each should have the same amount of farm products as the other. But 

 suppose one man milks his cows and raises his calves on skimmed milk 

 and corn, and the other man lets the calves run with the cows ; the dairy- 

 man will have just as many bushels of corn and tons of hay and acres of 

 pasture as the other man; he will have just as many calves, and just 

 as good calves, if he knows his business; he will have just as many 

 pigs, perhaps more pigs because he will have skimmed milk to 

 raise them on, and the other fellow will not; he will have absolutely 

 everything that his neighbor has and in equal amounts, and he will 

 have twenty-five to fifty dollars for the butter that he will sell from 

 each of his fifteen or twenty cows. That is to say, he will have 

 somewhere from four to seven hundred dollars more in money 

 than the other man who raised just as many crops, but didn't utilize them 

 in the same way. The butter that a man makes is a net profit to him. 

 That is why we have twenty million dollars that you people never saw. 

 The butter is a profit to the dairyman, to his county, his community, his 

 state, and makes for high-priced land and good farming. 



We have 655 creameries and skimming stations. In the past two 

 years the southern half of the state and the western part of the state 

 have developed enormously in the dairy industry. We now have the state 

 pretty well covered with creameries, and it is easy to predict with rea- 

 sonable confidence that the amount of butter we will produce in future 

 years will be still greater, and it is easy to predict that the amount of 

 money that you will get out of your butter production will be greater 

 and greater as the years go on, for this reason — it is the law of the 

 land, you will have to do it. Your lands will increase in value, as ours 

 have, and you will be obliged to get greater returns from them, and the 

 only way to do it, aside from better general methods, is by the practice 

 of dairying. 



Now, did you ever think of this : The farmer keeps no kind of live 



