^^^ Illinois State Dairymen's Association. 



her for a song. It is too good an investment for him. The 

 average farmer will find that if he wants good dairy cows he will 

 have to raise them himself, and he can do it in comparatively a 

 short time if he will adopt the plan and stick to it. 



I believe that one reason why we have not made more prog- 

 ress in dairying is that we do not follow it up long enough. We 

 start in on dairying, but by and by some other system appeals to 

 us, and we switch over on to that. We don't have to stay by 

 one single thing for we can make a living in so many different 

 ways on a farm. With us up in Michigan, when a business 

 dairyman has been in the business for some years he gets the idea 

 that he can make more money off from fruits and make it easier, 

 and he sells out his cows just at a time when he begins to get his 

 work systematized. We shift around too much. 



Like the Dane with the Irish name, we want to go into the 

 dairy business to stay in. The best method the dairy man adopts 

 is to secure a good sire with dairy qualities to head his herd, and 

 then raise the calves from the most profitable cows and with them 

 replace the cows that have proved unprofitable, but in order to 

 do this he must be able to tell the good cows from the poor ones, 

 and it cannot be done in any other way than by testing them and 

 weighing their milk. 



I received my first lesson in dairying from my father, who 

 had a dairy herd of eighty thoroughbred Holstein cows. He 

 used to tell me that the cows horns had to curve just so if she 

 was a profitable dairy cow, or the tail had to reach down below 

 the hock joint, otherwise, she would not give milk enough, and 

 things of that sort. Since the advent of the Babcock Tester, we 

 know that the external appearance of a cow does not always tell 

 her worth as a dairy cow. It is an old saying that you cannot 

 tell by the looks of a toad how far she can jump. Just so with 

 the dairy cow. You cannot tell by the looks of her whether she 

 will give you four or eight thousand pounds of milk a year. 



The dairyman must know three things about every individ- 

 ual in his herd, first, how much milk she will give, not in a week 

 or a month, but in a year, because he must feed her a year. 

 Second, he must know the richness of the milk in order to deter- 

 mine its market value. Third, he must know how much it costs 

 to keep the cow a year. This is an important factor. He must 



