68 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



men have gone into the dairy business, as in Wisconsin, for 

 instance, as a means of securing the necessary plant food for 

 their soils. They have followed the dairy business because 

 they needed manure first, and have made that the essential 

 product, with the milk second. Does not that answer the 

 question of why milk will not j^ay the cost of production ? By- 

 products have no relation whatever to the cost of the raw 

 material that goes into them ; by-products have no relation in 

 their selling value to the raw material that goes into them. 

 There was a time when wheat bran had no value, and was run 

 into the rivers to get rid of it ; and you can all remember when 

 cotton-seed meal had little or no value, and was piled by 

 thousands of tons behind the cotton gins of the south. Now 

 you pay $28 a ton for wheat bran and $35 a ton for cotton- 

 seed meal. More recently distillers' wastes had no value 

 except for feeding immediately around the plant where they 

 were produced ; and to-day you pay $32 a ton for dried dis- 

 tillers' grains. The price of wheat and cotton and the price 

 of corn and rye, from which the distillers' grains come, have 

 not changed a great deal since the '60s and 'TOs. You buy a 

 pound of digestible matter in all these by-products, and you 

 pay the same price for it, whatever it is, — and a high price, 

 because the genius and ability of man have given those by- 

 products a standard and fixed value, where formerly they 

 were waste. I am not going to discuss the feeding of these 

 by-products in dairying; I am simply using this as an illus- 

 tration of the reason for the comparatively low value of milk, 

 because it has been a by-product, and bears little or no relation 

 to the cost of production. 



Have you ever thought it out in that way ? I ask you 

 whether this is not the solution of the question why the dairy- 

 men all over the land are not getting paid for their labor ? 

 The great bulk of the milk produced is produecxl by the fam- 

 ily, — it is a family business, and no account is made of the 

 labor; there are a few exceptions where it is produced en- 

 tirely by hired labor. Whatever nuiy be your thought as to 

 the economies of milk production, whatever may be your skill 

 and ability to act, if ninety-nine men around you are working 

 on the old basis, with no regard to the cost of production, they 



