SIXTH ANMUALYEAR BOOK — PART V. 381 



state of things be changed" and he gave it a very intelligent answer, 

 but I propose to answer it. Mr. Chairman, in another way and I think, 

 also, in a practical way. 



I am not in lavor of the average farmer spending a large amount of 

 money in getting everyday animals for an average dairy herd. I do 

 not think he ought to do it, I do not think, Mr. Chairman, the 

 average farmer is the man who can engage in breeding pure 

 bred stock. He does not understand it well enough to make 

 a success of that, and I do not mean to say by that a single word 

 against the standard of intelligence of my brother the average farmer. 

 The thought that I give to you, Mr. Chairman, is that there are more 

 men who are legislators in the state of Iowa today than there are men 

 who have been successful breeders of live stock. I tell you it takes a 

 higher type of man, by I do not know how many degrees, to make a good 

 breeder than to make a successful legislator. For that reason I am not 

 in favor of the average farmer investing large sums of money in pure 

 bred stock, and more particularly I am not in favor of the man who is 

 engaged in the breeding of dairy cows in order to furnish milk for the 

 milk factory, but I am in favor of getting those cows in this way, — a way 

 I shall now refer to. Let him begin with scrub cows if he likes. I know 

 that word scrub is an indifferent term, it may be applied in many ways. 

 I do not use the term scrub in a derisive way at the present time. 

 Probably a better word would be the word common. 



Let me begin with a common cow. I do not care what the blood of 

 that cow is; I do not care if the blood of that cow consists of the elements 

 of ten or fifteen or twenty different breeds all mixed up, that would not 

 lessen the cow one iota for my purpose if I were going to establish a 

 dairy herd, a herd of milking cows. I would a little rather that those 

 blood properties were all mixed up. You may think that a strange talk, 

 but I mean what I say. Now you ask the question why,, — simply for this 

 reason that that additional blood element added to the cornponent 

 elements in the make up of that cow passes rapidly in the change when 

 the progress of upgrading begins that I am about to refer to. 



At the Minnesota station we went out and purchased in the stock yards 

 ewes that had been brought up on the range. Three years ago we took 

 the progeny of the descendants of these range ewes to the National Live 

 Stock show at Chicago and showed the lambs against the world and came 

 back with first prize to the state of Minnesota. That was done with 

 three generations of breeding. Now that that was so, was not a great sur- 

 prise to me. Of course I did not expect that we would get the prize, I 

 did not hope for that, but I did believe we could reach great excellence 

 by a proper system of breeding, beginning with stocks with that kind of 

 foundation. 



Now you know, farmers, that editors, especially, have had this charge 

 brought against them, — they have urged all farmers to use pure bred 

 stocks and nothing else, and the farmer has sometimes said that those 

 men were hired to write that sort of thin^ in order that the men who are 

 breeding pure bred stock could get a good price for their animals. This 

 is not so and does not need to be so. I do not need to tell the farmer that 

 if he persists in using a grade Instead of a pure bred sire properly 



