596 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



pose cow. You say you want a cow on which you can make a little on 

 the milk, a little on the butter, and a little on the carcass, but you 

 can't do that and not lose in every respect. I will take for illustration, 

 the Holstein, the extreme dairy breed, and the Hereford or Short-horn, 

 the extreme beef bred. We will put both on the market, both equally well 

 fed, and weighing the same, and the Hereford will bring from one-half 

 cent to one cent per pound more than the other. Why? Because the Hol- 

 stein is developed in the lower portion of the body and the other up where 

 the cuts are worth the least, in the back and loins. Again, the man 

 who attempts to use the beef cow in the dairy, is as foolish as the man 

 who would hunt birds with a bull dog. Get cows of the type that will fit 

 your needs. "I thought," you will say, "you said you were going to talk to 

 the average farmer, and now you tell us to go to an importer and buy 

 our stock." Yes, if you have plenty of money which most of us haven't. 

 We have come to the point where most of us realize that we must 

 have a better dairy cow, and that a cow that has been bred for a particular 

 purpose. What shall we do? We go to a man who has good pure bred 

 cows for sale, and select some that we think will answer our purpose 

 and find that they will cost from one hundred and fifty to two hundred 

 and fifty dollars each, and we can't afford to take them. The animals 

 are worth it, but we simply can't afford to pay the price. What then? 

 We have our heads set on pure bred stock, and we go down the line until 

 we find something that fits our pocketbook, and we say "these are pure 

 bred?" And they answer "Oh, yes." "They are registered?" "Oh, yes." 

 And we buy them, and take home the man's culls. He wouldn't have 

 sold them at that price if they had not been culls. 



I repeat that these animals have been bred for the particular pur- 

 pose for wjiich we want them. When we have made up our minds we 

 want a large supply of milk, and have plenty of feed, then we take the 

 Holstein; if butter, then we take the Channel Island cattle; if better 

 milk, and hilly pastures, then we take the Ayrshire, and if moat, then we 

 take the Hereford or Short-horn. A good cow is cheaper at sixty dollars 

 than a poor one is at ten. I am going to describe the requirements of a 

 good cow a little later. With the best grade of the particular type 

 desired, we will get a bull of the breed we want. Let me emphasize the 

 importance of a good bull. The importance of pure breed, I don't think 

 we emphasize that as we should. When we consider the breeding of 

 animals, the strain of the sire should be very carefully noted. Why, 

 gentlemen, what is a pure bred animal? It is simply one that has been 

 bred in a certain line so long that the type has become fixed. There 

 is always a tendency to go back to the characteristics of the ancestors, 

 and the better these characteristics and the longer they have been 

 bred, the nearer we get to the animals we want, and the more certain 

 we are of producing the tendencies of that line. The more we breed, 

 indiscriminately, the more likely we are to go back to the original ten- 

 dencies. To illustrate this, let us take the human family, and go right 

 back to the Jew. Since the days when Abraham went out from Ur of 

 Chaklea and went whither he knew not, down through the centuries, 

 there has been the Jew, and to-day when for more than two thousand 

 years he has had no country, he is as separate and distinct as he was 



