40 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



they retain the poor ones. The fallacy of this reasoning is self- 

 evident, and unless our dairy farmers see the wisdom of buying 

 pure bred and registered sires from known milk producing fam- 

 ilies, and use these sires upon their best grade cows, saving the 

 heifer calves, and in this way gradually bringing up the standard 

 of the dairy cows of this state, we will soon become a back num- 

 ber in the production of milk. Then from the point of cash val- 

 ues the high grade cow is worth more to sell than the low grade. 



Ash the dairymen who have been wise enough to buy pure 

 bred sires and grade up their herds what they think of such a 

 scheme, and if it pays financially; their answer will always be 

 Yes ! A great many modern dairy farmers have realized the im- 

 portance of testing their herds with the Babcock Test for butter 

 fat, weighing the milk from each cow, and keeping a record of 

 her production. Ask any one of these men if such a course has 

 made them money, and see what their answer will be. Always 

 and emphatically — YES ! It is sometimes hard to convince the 

 dairy farmer that he should own a Babcock Tester, and test his 

 own cows for butter fat; therefore, we have been striving to 

 organize associations among the dairy farmers for cow testing. 

 The object of these associations has been to try to band enough 

 dairy farmers together to minimize the expense by having one 

 man employed by the year to test all herds in the associations. Of 

 course the individual farmer can do his own testing very cheaply, 

 if he is wide enough awake to do so, and a technical education is 

 not required to successfully operate a Babcock Testing apparatus. 



But while we have been raising or buying cows there has 

 crept into our herds the white plague, "Tuberculosis," which an- 

 nually exacts a tremendous toll of lives of dairy cattle. I do not 

 know how many succumb to this disease during the year, but I 

 know it must be enormous. I hope some day we will have sta- 

 tistics that will show us what this death rate is among dairy ani- 

 mals. You will all agree with me that the health of the dairy 

 cow must be normal before she will yield us a normal profit, but 

 if she is affected with tuberculosis, sooner or later she will be- 

 come so emaciated and in such a poor condition that she will have 



