EIGHTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII. 353 



pounds of butter a week. That was pretty good. Then I found I could buy 

 six more from the same sire and I bought them and those cows gave me 

 grand results. If I could have continued on that line and raised cows 

 equal to them that breed would have been fine, but I bought some calves 

 along with those cows, bred to a beef sire. The calves were from a 

 beef sire and I raised them up, took great pride in them, worked over 

 them a great deal, took a great deal of care of them and fed them along 

 dairy lines. They were fine looking animals; men would drive along the 

 road and say, "Those are the finest looking animals I ever saw," but 

 when those calves came in there was not one of them worth spending 

 your time milking them. I kept them all until the second year and bred 

 them to the best bull I could find, but I was just as bad or worse off than 

 before. 



A dairy cow has two purposes, one in the milk that she will produce 

 and the amount of butter fat, and the other is the traits that she can 

 hand down to her offspring. The first dies when the cow dies and if she 

 has not the trait to pass on then her value is gone when she is dead; 

 but there is an inherent value in that cow and that is the reason the 

 special dairy cow, of the full blood at least and the high grade, is worth 

 more money than another cow that will give equal production, but has 

 not the characteristic to pass on to her offspring. That is the kind of 

 cow you want. If we are to make money out of dairy cows in this state 

 we will have to raise our annual production considerably over 140 pounds 

 of butter a year. As Governor Hoard said, in Jefferson county, Wiscon- 

 sin, his home county, with the Guernsey, Jersey and Holstine breeds, they 

 have raised the annual production to over 250 pounds of butter a year. 

 How are they doing it? Using the dairy sire exclusively and raising 

 the heifer calves. 



Those men will tell you to look at the rough food we raise in Iowa. 

 It puts me to my wits end to know how to raise the rough food my cattle 

 consume. A dairy calf will consume more rough food than any beef animal 

 I ever saw. That is what we want; we want to make a big digestive 

 tract for the food to pass through, and there is nothing like good clover 

 hay and rough food to feed to those dairy heifers and dairy cows. The 

 dairy cow will consume more rough food than any animal on earth of the 

 milking type. 



Do you know I think the time is passing when we are going to have 

 our big corn fields, with forty per cent of the value of the corn plant left 

 out in the field, to be worth perhaps 50 cents an acre for cattle to pick 

 over? We have got to stop that and we are going to do it by the silo. 

 We cannot afford, with land worth $100 or more per acre, to allow nearly 

 half of this valuable product to lie out of doors. The other day when I 

 came down on the train corn was standing in many places and I saw 

 cattle out in the corn fields with the snow coming down, the worst pos- 

 sible thing that could happen to a dairy cow. When I left home after 

 dinner my cattle had been out to drink and were back in the barn lying 

 down. There will be no stop in the production of milk in that herd if 

 the man in charge will take anywhere near the care I did, and when I 

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