40 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION 



DOES DAIRY^ FARMING MAINTAIN SOIL 

 FERTILITY. 



Dr. C. G. Hopkins, University of Illinois. 



In considering this question as to whether dairy farming 

 maintains soil fertility, I think we might ask what is dairy farm- 

 ing. Of course, if we buy plenty of feed from our neighbors 

 and feed it to our dairy cattle and take care of the manurial pro- 

 ducts, there is no question but what we could maintain soil fer- 

 tility by that means, or even increase it, but if we consider dairy 

 farming as an independent business in which the dairy man 

 produces his own feed, then we have a pretty fair question to 

 consider. If he buys feed from some one else and feeds it, to 

 that extent he is a manufacturer quite as much as a farmer. 

 You know up at Aurora and Elgin for a great many years 

 there have been extensive feeding plants. Men who were in- 

 terested in t\iat work have shipped sheep in from the western 

 ranges, many car loads, and put them in sheds at Elgin and Au- 

 rora, and have bought all sorts of feed, hay, screenings, some 

 concentrates, and fed them in those sheds for a few weeks or 

 months, and have then shipped them to market. That is pretty 

 purely manufacturing. Those men are not farming in any or- 

 dinary sense. They do not produce any food stuffs — they do 

 not own any land, except the land where their sheds are. 



From the extreme we can go to the independent dairy farm- 

 er who produces his own feed and does not buy. We are some- 

 times asked to do as Denmark does, or some other small coun- 

 tries of Europe, in our American agriculture, and it is only fair 

 that we consider what Denmark does in the production of crops. 



Denmark produces about 40 bushels of wheat per acre, 

 while the United States produces only 14 on an average. They 

 produce a little wheat in rotation with other crops, but the en- 

 tire kingdom of Denmark produces only four million bushels. 



