SIXTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART VIII. 897 



POSSIBILITIES OF DAIRYING ON THE FARM. 



MRS. D. J. COWDEX, BEFORE ADAIR COUNTY FARMERS INSTITUTE. 



A dairy is where milk is kept and converted into butter and cheese. 



In this day and age of progress this is an impossibility and very 

 unprofitable to the farmer. Why? Because the average farmer does not 

 have the time, place or machinery for making either butter or cheese; 

 and if he had, could not command the price our creameries do, where 

 thej' have every advantage and all the improved equipments and can 

 handle all the cream for miles around the creamery. 



1st. To get milk we must have cows. When I first started to have 

 anything to do with the cow, — twenty-five years ago, — we would milk 

 from six to eight or ten cows in the summer only, and do without milk 

 or butter in the winter. After milking we would carry the milk to 

 the cave, (few had cellars) strain it in gallon crocks, "let it stand from 

 twenty-four to forty-eight hours, then skim, empty the crocks into buckets, 

 generally tobacco or candy buckets, which held about five gallons, 

 carry up steps and to the hogs. 



Why but that was a back breaking way, and this was generally done 

 by the farmers wife. Then the cream had to be churned, and that meant 

 every day, too. The butter must be worked over twice then packed in 

 jars and taken to town and traded out; and I have got as low as six cents 

 per pound for it; and I thought I was doing wonderful things, buying 

 the groceries and trying to keep out of debt. But the groceries were few 

 and far between, and luxuries never. 



The cows had no care, — run on the prairie on feed range, in winter 

 seldom had any shelter unless it was a straw stack, and in spring would 

 be walking skeletons hardly thick enough to cast a shadow. And it took 

 some time to flesh up, and it would be the last of May before you would 

 get much milk. Then along came the flies, as thick as only can get flies 

 and these pests deprived the farmer of one one-third of their milk, and so 

 poor care mixed with flies didn't bring in many shillings. 



The first step away from the churns was cream gathering, that was 

 when a man came around and gathered the cream. The milk was kept 

 in large tin cans with a strip of glass in one side with inches marked 

 and these cans were kept in a large trough filled with water. This cream 

 was sold by the inch, but the same Company never run two summers in 

 succession, and always broke up, owing the farmers for the last months 

 cream.. This didn't pay the farmer, but it might have helped the cream- 

 ery Company at the expense of their good name. The second step was sell- 

 ing your milk to the creamery or skimming station, hiring all the milk 

 hauled to the station and separated there, and then hauled back, — but it 

 was never fit to feed to calves. Every one has his own ideas, but mine 

 are that this milk hauling is what killed off all the cheap horses and 

 helps account for the present high price of horses. When horse 

 flesh came up, milk haulers went out, except the ones that had a receipt 



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