110 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



THE RELATION OF THE DAIRY COW TO FERTILITY. 



By 

 Ey A. J. Glover, Associate Editor Hoard's Dairyman, Ft. Atkinson, Wis. 



Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen : — It is like coming 

 home for me to visit Elgin. It was my good fortune to live in 

 this city for three years and to labor with the dairymen of the 

 Stale of Illinois for nearly four years. 



I have often wondered if I did not learn more from you 

 than you did from me. It is not necessary for me to say that 

 I came here for the purpose of determining the relative value 

 of the cow and to get the dairymen to understand the import- 

 ance of knowing the ability of each cow in their herds. In my 

 investigations I found good cows, fair cows, poor cows and 

 cows that were worse than worthless. But I did not come here 

 to talk to you about the kind of cows to keep, but their relation 

 to fertility of the soil. 



I cannot tell you the feeling I experienced when I first went 

 to the agricultural college and was told that plants feed much 

 the same as animals do ; that in the production of a hundred 

 bushels of corn, a definite amount of food is required. It had 

 never occurred to me that cropping the land year after year 

 would in time exhaust the fertility of the land, and if continued 

 long enough would make the soil unproductive. As I advanced 

 in the study of agricultural problems I found that the different 

 systems of farming required different methods of soil tre it- 

 ment ; that grain farming took more fertility out of the soil 

 than live stock raising; that the dairy cow was the easiest upon 

 the fertility of the soil; that she made the rotation of crops pos- 

 sible and that she consumed considerable forage that has no 

 market value without her. 



I want to take up the elements of plant food and do not 

 want to weary you but I want to talk in as practical a way as 

 possible. 



There are ten important elements of plant food we must 



