120 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION 



If I had the time I could give many and many an instance, 

 where men in Minnesota, and I have found them in other states 

 also, have turned over to the shambles dairy sires that were 

 worth their weight in silver, simply because they did not know 

 their value. Such killing of grand good sires is a serious loss to 

 the dairy industry of this great middle west. A man who had 

 studied this subject matter that I advocate, would have recog- 

 nized the quality of these animals and would have stopped the 

 slaughter in time to have saved this great loss. I am well aware 

 that the views which I hold are opposed by some men, but on the 

 other hand we have ample backing from some of the best 

 breeders of America, and I have a backing of twenty years of 

 success based upon the principles which we recognize to be true. 



I wish the dairymen present would remember that we are 

 not speaking from the experience of one little farm, but from a 

 large number of farms, where we have placed dairy sires, and 

 every one of them a success. We have, however, to remember 

 one case in which we gave our recommendation for a sire through 

 the backing of a man who claimed to know how to select dairy 

 cattle, and that recommendation placed an illy bred brute of a 

 Holstein sire in the hands of two young men, where he wrought 

 the evil result that will ever follow the use of a full-blooded 

 scrub. We not only have a demonstration on our own farm of 

 the principles which we advocate, but we have also made a fine 

 demonstration at one of our state institutions, where we have 

 selected upon two separate occasions Holstein sires for the im- 

 provement of the herd of that asylum. 



We are not in sympathy with the plan which some would 

 carry out to establish a new ^breed of dairy cattle. We already 

 have a good number of dairy breeds well established from which 

 we can get by selection the animals that we need, and we can 

 make a greater advancement by using these cattle and breeding 

 them in dairy lines than we can by crossing the breeds or by any 

 other step by which we are apt to lose so much of time by that 

 great force which every reader recognizes, namely, reversion. 

 Now, reversion is that part of breeding that we must ever guard 

 against. Breeding is sometimes defined as based upon the law 



