374 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



product. He may sell whole milk to a city, or a condensery. 

 He may take his milk to a cheese factory and carry home the 

 whey, or he may separate the cream and sell it for city use or to 

 a butter factory. If the milk is marketed through the cheese 

 factory, hog production is introduced as a supplementary indus- 

 try using the whey. If he sells cream, calf raising and pork 

 production may be combined with dairying as a means of using 

 the skim milk. All of these different types of dairying can be 

 based upon the corn-oats-hay cropping system. The combina- 

 tion a given farmer should choose depends upon which pays 

 best under his particular conditions of production and marketing. 



The dairy farmer has, of course, other alternatives. He can 

 change from dairying to beef and pork production, based upon 

 the same field crops. Again, he can abandon cattle and hogs 

 entirely, grow grain to sell and raise horses as a side-line to use 

 up much of the unsalable roughage ; but in figuring the merits 

 of this last system, influence upon fertility and production of 

 grain per acre should not be ignored. He has the further alter- 

 native of trying his fortune in the city, and this horn of the 

 dilemma has frequently been the choice. 



With all these opportunities before them, the farmers are slow 

 to shift from one thing to another in normal times because, for a 

 given community, the question of what pays best becomes fairly 

 well settled. Near the cities, whole milk of high quality is pro- 

 duced under sanitary conditions of a higher standard than in 

 other dairy regions. Outside of the milk zone there are scatter- 

 ing cream shippers selected mainly with respect to the characters 

 of the farmers participating. These are intermingled with the 

 farmers producing for the creameries and cheese factories. The 

 city milk zone becomes more or less well defined with the bound- 

 ary line moving out a little farther in winter and contracting 

 in summer, with a gradual expansion of the milk zone about a 

 growing city. 



But in abnormal times, when radical changes are taking place 

 in the prices of all these competing lines of production, farmers 

 with their eyes upon the market become uneasy and unsettled 

 in their convictions as to what to produce. The fact that the 



