ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 177 



deceived, not only once but many times in selecting animals to fi.ll his 

 barns? 



Fourth. The cow has no friend and gets no breeding. Under tills 

 vicious system nobody breeds the cow. When you stand before a fresh 

 cow to judge her and perhaps to buy her, you may rest assured that her 

 dam was a very ordinary individual else she would have made her way 

 to a dairy and this cow would have been butchered as a calf. In a few 

 words the dairymen, who presumably are most interested in good cows. 

 are most busily engaged in destroying the best ones, and their calves as 

 well. In the meantime who keeps up the supply and how is it done? It 

 is no wonder that the average cow is the most inefficient of all domes- 

 tic animals, for what little good breeding she gets is irregularly seenrecl 

 at the hands of stray people who keep one or two animals, and the quality 

 would rapidly fall far below present standards were it not that the dairy- 

 man's skill as a judge often fails him and he walks off with the inferior 

 animals and these same people who keep the twos and threes succeed in 

 holding back some of the best individuals. 



The cow is the weakest link in the chain of factors that, make tip 

 modern dairying, and when looked at in the cold eye of business she is 

 upon the average a wonderfully inefficient machine, because it is com- 

 paratively easy to produce a cow that will yield more than double that 

 of the average. 



Two very ordinary cows were fresh upon the same day at the Uni- 

 versity and careful records were kept of food consumed and milk yielded 

 from each for ninety days. The result showed that one of the ecmss had 

 produced at the rate of one pound of fat for ten pounds of grain, and 

 fourteen pounds of roughness, while the other required eleven pounds of 

 the same grain and the same proportion of roughness. This is a differ- 

 ence of ten per cent in the efficiency of these two cows. Greater differ- 

 ences could easily be found, and indeed more than twenty-five per .pent 

 has been noted between good cows, but even ten per cent is far merefhaia 

 any rate of profit the dairyman can reasonably expect; that is to say 

 here are differences wider than tbe margin of profit, and these cTiffereaees 

 must be noted, and cows must be bred with regard to performance. Anoth- 



