900 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



"I bought and shipped the product of the cow keeper in this vicinity 

 for thirteen years . I learned that there was very little profit for the 

 farmer as cows were then kept. Except for the calves and hogs it would 

 have been uphill business, but as milk was necessary for both it paid to 

 keep them to a certain extent. We first bought salted butter and 

 rewoi-ked it, then the unsalted and reworked that. In the main the salted 

 butter was of an inferior quality, caused by variety of flavor, 

 color and texture. To secure greater uniformity we a- 



dopted the system of buying the butter unsalted from the churn in its 

 granular form, thus enabling us by salting, coloring and working to pro- 

 duce good grade butter. Still the market demanded something better. This 

 led us into the creamery business and the gathering of sweet cream from 

 the farmers, which we took, ripened, churned and packed into tubs. Un- 

 der this system we took a cow census twice a year and found that on an 

 average the cow yielded less than one-third of a pourid a day during 

 the grass or milking season. Notwithstanding these conditions the busi 

 ness grew to a car load of butter a week during the months of May, June, 

 July, August and September, showing that an even a discouraging profit 

 people still kept their cows. Always interested in the dairying I bought 

 another farm, stocked it with Jersey and Guernsey cows and built a silo. 

 At that time the silo was rather a new thing, and did not prove to be the 

 success I had expected. We cut our corn too green. Our ensilage was 

 sour, but the cows ate it fairly well. The silo was not built 

 tight enough to exclude the air, which spoiled more or less 

 of the ensilage. However, we were on the right road. We 

 had the right quality of cows and used a good deal of bran with the 

 ensilage. The result was entirely satisfactory at that time . 



"When I retired from business I sold that farm and the cows, but had 

 left on my hands 160 acres of very wet, practically unsalable land. I 

 made up my mind I could make a dairy farm of it. I put in 1, 600 rods 

 of tile and put up some buildings. We bought ten high grade shorthorn 

 cows and a Hereford male with the idea of combining stock raising with 

 dairying, beef being high and dairy products low, while my tenant was 

 an excellent stockman and knew little of the dairy. At this time our 

 feeding of the cows was not productive of the best results for milk. The 

 first year the butter product per cow was $24, and after deducting the 

 cost of maintenance, which would be fully $20, the profit was very small. 

 The next year we fed more bran and the results were better— $2G per cow. 

 The following two years we increased our herd to sixteen cows and the 

 product was $36 per cow, the result, we believve, of feeding more clover 

 hay with bran and oil meal. In 1904, with the same cows, the average 

 was $40 a head, due to the better care and a more perfect ration. In 1905 

 my books show an increase of $17 per cow over the year before, or 

 $57 each. 



"In the spring of 1903 I sowed 2 acres of alfalfa. It came up and did 

 well during the early summer, but died out in the latter part of the sea- 

 son. Undeterred by this failure, last spring I produced from the govern- 

 ment agricultural department at Washington bacteria to inoculate the 



