ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 113 



amazingly later on, and you will have developed a cow that 

 dairymen will want. 



Do not discard a young cow if she does not meet your ex- 

 pectations the first year, but give her another trial. Frequently 

 she will double the amount of milk the second year, but if the 

 second season is not satisfactory, sell her to the butcher. 



Having told you how to breed a dairy cow cheaply, and how 

 to raise a calf without a dollar's worth of milk, I will now tell 

 you the ordinary way of feeding cows, its cost, and how to re- 

 duce not only the cost of the feed nearly one half, but the labor 

 one half also, and do away with all machinery. 



It is customary with many to feed a milk cow clear corn- 

 meal and hay, and for a little time she may appear to be doing 

 well, but some morning you find that the milk has fallen off won- 

 derfully, and probably some of it is ropy, one quarter of the 

 udder is hard, and she does not care for any breakfast. Now 

 you are in for a backset sure. It is the certain result of an un- 

 balanced, concentrated ration. The system is full of fever. 

 The Babcock milk test will show that the butter fat is almost 

 entirely burnt out of the milk. 



Right here I want to say that even with the most judicious 

 feeding, the butterfat in milk is more sensitive to changes than 

 any organ of the bod}--. The wonderful variations in the quality 

 of the milk from day to day cannot be satisfactorily explained 

 by any one, and is one of the few unsolved problems that have 

 attracted the attention of dairy scientists. You may keep the 

 cow from day to day under exactly the same conditions as nearly 

 as possible, temperature not allowed to vary a single degree, 

 food and water weighed and exact amounts given each day, and 

 yet the butter fat test will show variations that look about like 

 the notes on a bar of music. 



I have known men to get a contract to sell their milk at the 

 condensing factory, go to the cow sales, buy everything that had 

 a calf by its side, whether it belonged there or not, pay high 

 prices, take them home and feed to each cow an eight-quart pan 

 full of clear corn meal at each feed. In the course of a few 

 months, we find the same men cursing the whole business, and 



