50 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION 



SOME LESSONS AS A BEGINNER IN DAIRYING 



Professor R. E. Muckelroy 

 Southern Illinois State Normal University, Carbondale 



Fellow Dairymen: It is indeed a pleasure for me to 

 come into this section of the state and to discuss with you 

 some of our problems that are in common. 



I have been attending our State Dairymen's Conven- 

 tions for several years, and I have listened with a great 

 deal of pleasure and profit to the discussions which have 

 been of a more or less technical nature. I have taken these 

 fine things and built it into my own will power and, as I 

 feel, have been moving into some principles of constructive 

 dairying. 



I am under obligations to our friend to make this talk 

 just as short as I can, and to make it just as pointedly as 

 possible. You know, gentlemen, I live way down in south- 

 ern Illinois, in a section of the state that is altogether dif- 

 ferent from yours. You here on this upper Illinois eleva- 

 tion have a probability to contend with which we do not. 

 In other words your nitrogen content is nearly twice as 

 much as that of the lower Illinois agronomist, your phos- 

 phorus is nearly one-third greater, your potassium content 

 is nearly one-fourth greater; so the problems in fertility 

 which we have to meet are not in common, but there are 

 some general principles which you and I have to deal with, 

 which are absolutely in common, and the first thing that I 

 want to mention is the balance of livestock with our farm 

 food production, the whole meat with your troubles as 

 well as the meat with ours. In other words if you and I 

 are going into the dairying business we don't want to start 

 with a number of cattle, with a number of horses, and with 

 a number of sheep that is altogether beyond what we can 

 produce our feed for, because no section of the country or 

 county ever was a great dairy section that did not produce 

 the greater part of the foods. No individual ever became 



