2OO Singing Valleys 



of milk. But a century later, cider had come under a moral ban. 

 There were babies who got pork gravy instead. In those years 

 America shocked the world by her high infant mortality rate. 



Until quite recent years, the milkman drove into town from 

 the farm very early in the morning, and went from house to 

 house, dipping the raw milk from his cans into the pitchers 

 which were set out for him on every doorstep. Milk was just 

 milk. There was no thought of grading it by its butter-fat 

 content. As for pasteurization no one expected milk to keep 

 sweet longer than thirty-six hours. No one expected, either, 

 that cows and cow barns should be anything but dirty. As for 

 the milker's hands when he sat down on the stool, he pulled 

 a little milk from the cow's udders onto his hands, rubbed 

 them well and let the drops run off his hands into the pail. 

 This preliminary ritual over, he leaned his forehead against 

 the cow's flank and went to work in earnest, until the warm 

 milk foamed over the sides of the pail. 



The tremendous and rapid advance in dairying methods and 

 in the amount of milk produced in this country has all come 

 about within the past seventy years. The shipment of milk 

 to the cities first by rail, later by tank trucks, the discovery of 

 a means of condensing milk to be sold in cans, and the inven- 

 tion of the cream separator, turned dairying into a business. 

 It now represents 23 percent of America's income from agri- 

 culture. 



The first step toward this was the improvement of the dairy 

 herds throughout the country. Probably the two men who did 

 the most to teach farmers that there was more money to be 

 made from cows of good stock, which were well fed and 

 tended, were Governor W. D. Hoard of Wisconsin, and J. H. 

 Monrad who served Illinois as assistant dairy commissioner. 

 Governor Hoard's writings in the agricultural journals of his 

 state and his speeches on the subject of dairying built up the 

 wealth Wisconsin has today. They also made Wisconsin a 

 corn-growing state. Far and away the greatest part of its corn 

 goes into the silos beside the barns to be fed to dairy herds 

 through the winter. The milk that comes from those herds 



