SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART II X!) 



a. man io rlo the testing. They i)ay him accovdins to the number of cows 

 they have, so much a cow, and our associations arc organized to pay not 

 more than $1.60 a year for each cow, so 320 cows to an association make it 

 self-supporting; that is, so far as the salary of the tester is concerned. 

 The state college furnishes the record books and all the testing material 

 for the association. The work of this man is something like this: He 

 arrives at the farm in the evening when I milk; I put the milk into his 

 weighing can and he weighs it and takes a sample for testing; tomorrow 

 morning he does the same thing and tests the samples for butter fat for 

 that day. Then he takes that as the average for the month, figures the 

 monthly record on that basis and gives the cow credit for it. The idea 

 of the proposition and the main points we are working for is to give the 

 actual transaction between the man and his cow to land out whether the 

 cows are paying a profit. Besides weighing the milk, taking samples and 

 doing the testing, it is this man's job also to weigh the feed and charge 

 the cow up with it at the regular market price. After he has done that 

 for twelve months he knows just how much each cow has produced in 

 butterfat and milk, and he knows just how much it has cost the owner 

 to keep those cows and how much profit each cow has made. He furnishes 

 each man with a herd book, the testing dates and the figures. He- does 

 all this work and the owner has the book there to refer to each time 

 after the tester leaves and he knows just where each cow stands. The 

 value of such an association, I think, is readily seen. Especially two or 

 three of the big points, and I am going to mention several of those and 

 show you some of the results obtained in these associations, because I 

 feel they are representative of what the average man is doing. 



We are not especially interested in the specialized dairyman. The 

 man we are working with is the average man, the one who is milking 

 ten or fifteen cows and wants to make some money on them. In other 

 words, we are trying to get better cows instead of more cows for Iowa, 

 and if we are to lead in dairying, as I believe we will ultimately (we 

 now stand third as a dairy state: "Wisconsin first. New York second, and 

 Iowa third), we will have to increase the productive value of our cows. 

 The average production is 140 to 150 pounds. That is the average pro- 

 duction of the cow in Iowa in butterfat. Figuring that at 30c a pound, 

 gives an income of $42. It is pretty hard to say how much the average 

 feed costs, but I know the average cost in our cow-testing associations, 

 which include 5,500 cows, is $38, and by subtracting that from the $42 

 income, makes the profit $4 a cow for the year. Suppose your cow is 

 milked twice a day for 300 days, or 600 milkings per year — how many of 

 us can afford to milk a cow 600 times for $4? And I feel sorry for the 

 fellow who is in the dairying business if he has that kind of cow. There 

 is a chance to get a much better cow than this, and I believe I can back 

 it up with figures that an average man can take the average herd of the 

 state, just the common cows, and by the use of pure-bred sires, testing 

 and selecting, in three to five years have a herd that will average 300 

 pounds of fat. I am going to put on the blackboard the record of a man 

 from the Benson association near Cedar Falls. This man startoi in tho 



