XV 



CONCEENING DAIRYING AS A BUSINESS 



The writer lives on an old farm in the Hill-Ooun- 

 try of eastern New York just where the western 

 foothills of the Catskills merge themselves with the 

 central New York plateau. We have been farm- 

 ers on this land since 1800. It is a farm that,"^ 

 judged by corn-belt standards, is too hilly and 

 stone-strewn for easy or successful farming. It is 

 a farm where the side-hill plow will always find 

 a place and there are many fields from which the 

 tractor and hay-loader will be forever barred. But 

 the hills are good hills nevertheless, great furrows 

 from the glacial plow, and the bowlder-clay and 

 limestone drift of which they are composed make 

 a soil where grass and alfalfa and oats are much 

 at home. The farm lies high above sea level and 

 we do not grow com as easily as if we were a 

 thousand feet lower or a few hundred miles further 

 south. More and more with the years we and all 

 our neighbors are discovering that we belong in 

 the dairy belt and that our best agricultural oppor- 

 tunity lies in the keeping of cows. From earliest 

 boyhood my farm activities have been linked with 



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