286 hOAUT) OF AGRICULTURE. 



out any difficulty for the manure that we can make ourselves, 

 but the question what to do with our milk is a good deal 

 more serious. Under certain circumstances I believe fully 

 that milk can be made to sell at a profit, and that it is 

 economical to sell milk from a farm ; but I do not believe it 

 iri profitable unless the conditions arc so favorable that the 

 milk commands a price which will justify the farmer in lib- 

 eral purchases of food, if not of manure to be brought back 

 to the farm to replace the fertility which is constantly re- 

 moved in the form of milk. The old saying will bear 

 repetition, that when you are disposing of milk, year after 

 3'ear, when the milk is taken off from the farm, whether 

 you are shipping it for sale or whether it goes to a cheese 

 factory, you arc really selling your farm by the gallon or by 

 the pound ; and these drafts upon the fertility of the soil must 

 be returned in one form or another. Cons'^quently, you are 

 not justified in selling milk or in removing it from the farm 

 unless the income from it is sufficient, and unless you recog- 

 nize it as sufficient, and are willing to replace the manurial 

 elements removed with the milk in the form of food or fer- 

 tilizers. But we may sell the cream of the milk from the 

 farm indefinitely without any appreciable efiect upon the 

 fertility of the ftirm. If butter alone is removed, or the 

 cream that makes butter, and the skim milk is kept at 

 home, or brought back again and used on the farm, there 

 is no appreciable draft on the fertility of the farm. This 

 is my foundation argument in favor of the disposition of 

 the cows' milk product solely in the form of butter, and 

 of using the milk, as a rule, upon the farm. No matter 

 what your class of live stock may be, skim milk and butter^ 

 milk are as economical as any food that is at the command of 

 the farmer for the rearing of young stock, properly supple- 

 mented by other food or mixed with other food. 



I am in favor of butter making, on the ground of economy, 

 on the farms in this region. And then comes the question. 

 How shall that butter be made ? If the work is done on the 

 old system of private management, two or three things are 

 absolutely necessary. The butter maker, in order to get 

 anything like the value of his product, must have a special 

 market ; he must have either one or more reliable cus- 



