20 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION 



purposes. And what kind of a bull is that? Why, it is the 

 bull that has been trained, or his ancestors have, on both 

 sides, for years, to take the feeds of the farm and convert 

 them into milk economically. That is the function of the 

 dairy cow. Her function is not speed, her function is not 

 graft, her function is not to accept hardships, but her func- 

 tion is to take the feeds grown on the farm, supplemented 

 with by-products from the mills, and convert them into the 

 most refined product in all the world — milk, a product not 

 only important to the human race but essential to its exist- 

 ence. 



Herbert Hoover has said the white race cannot exist 

 without milk, but a lot of people feel there is nothing to 

 dairy breeding. They try to get the two-purpose cow, try 

 to build both milk and beef in the same animal, and where 

 that has been done we have never seen any great dairy 

 progress. Wisconsin didn't make her tremendous progress 

 in dairying until she set aside the idea that you could cre- 

 ate in one animal outstanding products of milk as well as 

 beef, but devoted themselves to the breeding of cows for 

 the purpose of conveying the feeds of the farm into milk. 



But, someone will say, there is nothing to breed. It 

 is all in the corn crib. My chief, ex-Governor Hoard, was 

 one time speaking in Vermont when an old farmer got up 

 and said, ''Hoard, there is nothing to this breeding." Hoard 

 said, 'Is that so, young man? In my state there is a little 

 horse by the name of 'JIC that can trot a mile in 2:10 

 when fed two quarts of oats. That is the speed product of 

 two quarts of oats when fed to JIC. You have horses in 

 your barn that won't trot a mile in five minutes if they 

 were fed five tons of oats — all in the corn crib." 



South of here they hunt quail in the fall. I presume 

 that you hunt some prairie chickens here in the fall. Have 

 you ever seen a man taking a bulldog to go to hunt for prai- 

 rie chickens or quail? You take a bulldog if you want to 

 win a fight, but if you go to hunt quail you take a dog bred 

 for that purpose, trained for it, but we find people chasing 

 for butter fat with bulls no more accomplished in the pro- 

 duction of butter fat than the bulldog is in hunting prairie 



