FIFTY-FIRST ANNUAL CONVENTION 111 



Com and Alfalfa. 



Profitable dairying depends as much on growing effi- 

 cient high yielding crops as on keeping high producing 

 cows. But the crop side, and especially the legume side, 

 never has been considered half as much as the cow side. 

 This is true in farm practice, in dairy investigation, and in 

 dairy teaching. A great campaign of investigation and pub- 

 licity revealing the poor, unprofitable cow, and showing the 

 great value of the high producing cow and how to develop 

 her, has swept over the country for more than a decade, 

 widely establishing the absolute necessity for the good cow 

 and the folly of feeding and milking the poor cow. This 

 knowledge and the hundreds of demonstrations of it, have 

 produced a great effect on dairy practice. Much progress 

 has been made in the improvement of dairy herds. 



We all understand that the dairy cow worth keeping 

 must have a high ability to consume feed and manufacture 

 it into milk. But we never have put our minds upon a simi- 

 lar and equally fundamental phase of dairying — that the 

 crops grown upon an acre should produce a large amount of 

 suitable material for making milk. The acre is an invest- 

 ment and the labor to cultivate it is an expense. It is just as 

 necessary that this acre should produce a high yield of raw 

 material for milk as that the cow should be an efficient 

 manufacturer of milk. 



In the Milk Per Acre Demonstration carried on for six 

 years at the University of Illinois to determine the amount 

 of milk and fat that could be produced wholly from the 

 crops grown on a given area, the first necessity was the se- 

 lection of the crops that would furnish the greatest amount 

 of digestible nutrients or feed value, both per acre and per 

 day's labor, and still supply a palatable, nutritious, and well 

 balanced ration for dairy cows. The best basis on which to 

 compare the efficiency of crops for this purpose is the di- 

 gestible nutrients produced per acre, as shown in the ac- 

 companying table. The total amount of digestible nutrients 

 produced by each crop per acre is shown graphically by the 

 length of line after each crop below the table. The heavy 



