ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION 47 



that off. You will have some idea of the condition that this 

 farm was in when we took it. The land wouldn't raise only 

 about 15 to 20 bushels of corn to the acre and hardly that. By 

 keeping it heavily stocked, we have got it today to where an 

 acre of it will produce from 60 to 70 bushels of shelled corn, 

 The way we have done it is by milking cows, keeping hogs and 

 such other stock as we have. 



When we started in on this place, we had a dairy of cattle 

 that was picked from two dairies. I would not tell this up 

 home. My brother and I were both on rented farms, cash rent 

 and they were heavily stocked. We had a sale and sold the stock 

 off of my place and changed a few of the cows. The best cows 

 in my herd I took to my brother's place, and the poorest of my 

 brother's were fetched to mine and sold at this auction, and we 

 thought we had an excellent herd. 



We started in that way. Raised all our heifers and took 

 our milk to the butter factory. We took the skim milk back and 

 fed it to the hogs. 



One day a young man, Mr. Glover, came from the Univer- 

 sity oi Illinois, and he wanted us to take up this w^ork that Prof. 

 Fraser has told us of today. Wanted us to testour cows to 

 see what they were doing. We told him we had a good dairy 

 and did not want to spend the extra time, that we knew enough 

 about dairying so we could handle cattle all right. He talked to 

 us a little while, and finally he got us to consent to try it for 

 a while 



We started in and followed it up for one year, and when 

 we got our paper back, showing what our cows had done, I tell 

 you we didn't feel very proud of it. Our cows only averaged a 

 trifle over 200 lbs. of butter a piece. We thought we had cows 

 that we could make milk from, or we could make beef from. We 

 found out that there wasn't but a few of them that were paying us 

 a profit. We asked Mr. Glover what kind of cattle he would 

 advise us to go into. He says, ''Boys, that is for you to decide. 

 If you want to run a dairy farm of milk cows, go into some dairy 

 breeds, no matter whether Jerseys, Ayreshires, Holsteins or 



