EIGHTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII. 305 



march to the sea and live off the country. The farmer is the primal 

 proposition and a good many years ago I saw it and pretty much all I 

 have tried to do has been to get the farmer to see the truth that I saw 

 in the distance. I hear a great deal of complaint about poor creameries; 

 I never saw one that existed in an intelligent farm neighborhood. Never. 

 An intelligent community of farmers will not have a poor creamery, and 

 show me a first class creamery anywhere in the country and I will show 

 you a first class intelligence on the part of the men who support it; 

 therefore, to get at the root of the matter to elevate the dairy interests, 

 to increase the efficiency of the creamery and cheese factory, we must 

 apply our thought and purpose to the real foundation of the work. 



I am going to talk to you today upon the general question of dairy 

 farming. I might put it under a different head, but this is good enough. 

 I am a good deal in the condition of the old German who remarked about 

 his wife: "She pe not so very handsome and she pe not so very smart, 

 but Gott in Himmel she is the best I haf py me." 



I have been a close student of dairying, particularly from the farm 

 end, for nearly fifty years. Fifty-six years ago I commenced the work — 

 a boy. It was a fortunate thing I fell into the hands of a good man. I 

 left my little country district school; had to go to work as a hired man 

 on the farm and I fell into the hands of a man by the name of Simmons, 

 who had fifty cows, and he encouraged me to come and work for him, 

 and I worked for him most of the time until I was twenty-one. He 

 taught me to make butter and cheese and to care for his farm and left 

 it in my hands the last two years, and I had to manage this farm for him. 

 I came west in 1857, in the midst of that great panic, the worst panic 

 that this country ever saw, when not only business went to pieces, but 

 money went to pieces and I cut wood in the woods on the Beaver 

 Dam river in Wisconsin for twenty-five cents a cord. I could earn fifty 

 cents a day. Think of it. young men who are groaning and complaining 

 about hard times, when 1 was paid my fifty cents a day, three dollars a 

 week, I did not know the next morning whether that money was worth 

 anything. Think of it. Take courage, oh you sons of the soil; you know 

 but very little of what this country has gone through to evolve this 

 present condition. We call these hard times, we think now we are in the 

 midst of a panic. 



I have been a close student of dairying, particularly from the farm 

 end, for nearly fifty years. In all this time I have been greatly impressed 

 with the fact of the ignorance of men who keep cows, concerning what 

 I may call the foundation principles of dairy practice. My greatest 

 hindrance has been my own ignorance. In my lecture work in most every 

 state of the union and in Canada, in my study and work as editor of a 

 dairy paper, and on my dairy farm with a herd of forty registered cows, 

 everywhere has this question of the necessity of more and better light, 

 better understanding of plain simple dairy truth been constantly before 

 my eyes. Everywhere do I see farmers struggling to win success with 

 cows, and everywhere do I see only a very meager reward. All the time 

 I have been convinced that there is from 100 to 600 per cent more net 



20 



