306 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



profit for any farmer to receive if lie will but cast aside his prejudice and 

 indifference and look at the question in its right light. 



The more I investigate this question of net profit the more astounded 

 do I become at the tremendous difference that exists between the men 

 who think and those who will not think. Here is an illustration: There 

 are two patrons of the Hoard's creameries living a half mile apart. One 

 has thirty cows and the other nineteen. To the man with the thirty cows 

 the creamery paid the sum of $35.00 per cow for the milk of one year. 

 To the man with the nineteen cows was paid $60.00 per cow. It cost 

 each of those men $30,00 a piece to keep their cows for "the year. One 

 man got $30.00 above the cost of keeping; the other man got $5.00. Thirty 

 dollars is 600 per cent more than five dollars. Think of what an interest 

 that is. What was the matter of the five dollar man? A lack of dairy 

 understanding. What did it do? It caused, first, poor cows; second, 

 poor stabling; third, poor feeding. The best cow in the world could not 

 do good work unless well cared for and rightly fed. 



I used to spend hours with that five dollar man to get him to see the 

 truth about himself, his ideas and his methods. He would not read or 

 inform himself. He was trying to do his work with too little exercise of 

 brains. There were three factors or causes for that man's loss of good 

 reward; poor thinking is first. Now that caused poor cows; caused him 

 to provide poor stabling and poor feeding. Did you ever think of what 

 would happen if a man went on to the race track with a 2,000-pound 

 draft horse to compete with a thoroughbred trotter? Would such a man 

 get any sympathy from the crowd if he lost his money, which he would 

 be sure to do? All over Iowa, as well as other states, do we see farmers 

 working hard to win on this dairy race track, with just about such an 

 equipment of ideas, cattle and fitness of things. 



In my cow census work, from the Atlantic states to the Mississippi 

 river, I am overwhelmed with the poverty of ideas, cattle and care that 

 farmers invest in this business; and I am amazed that they do not see 

 where the trouble lies. Let me explain what a cow census is. I send an 

 expert into a creamery neighborhood to investigate the year's business 

 of 100 farmers who have been patrons of a creamery for a full year. I 

 want to dig down to the very bottom of each farmer's business. The 

 expert is to find how many cows he m^ilked for the year; of what breed 

 they are; how they were fed, stabled and cared for; and finally what 

 was the cost of keeping those cows for a year, counting pasturage at 

 $5.00. After all this knowledge has been obtained, at the farm end, he 

 goes to the creamery and finds how much milk was received and how 

 much cash the patron got for the year. Then he figures up from that 

 how much the patron's cows earned at the creamery, for every dollar 

 spent in feed. Lastly he inquires into how the farmer fed his own mind; 

 whether he was a reader of dairy papers. This was to find whether he 

 took any pains to be a well informed dairy farmer and note what effect 

 that had on his fortune. Then the expert writes ten letters to Hoard's 

 Dairyman describing the work of ten patrons in each letter. These 

 patrons are described by number from 1 to 100, and not by name. 



Now, you see that from 100 average patrons I can obtain a very fair 

 idea of what the great body of dairy farmers in a state are doing. In 



