128 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION 



THURSDAY, 1:30 P. M. 



FACTORS MOST DIRECTLY INFLUENCING THE 

 PROFITS ON DAIRY FARMS. 



Prof. W. J. Fraser, University of Illinois. 



Of course there are a great many factors that influence the 

 profits on dairy farms, but we want to discuss only a few of the 

 principal ones. Those are, the effect of pure bred, grade and a 

 scrub sire on the herd, the production of milk and butter fat per 

 cow, the yield of crops that the different farms get, and several 

 of those most important things. I want to base this on some 

 figures we have gotten from the Department of Dairy Hus- 

 bandry under the Dairy Survey of Northern Illinois. This 

 covers seven townships in the vicinity of Elgin, five in Kane 

 County and three in McHenry County. We obtained from 

 these some 765 farms, the best we could, the amount of milk 

 and butter fat produced, and asked some hundred questions, 

 and the results I have to show you this afternoon are the re- 

 sults after these questions have been summarized. 



We have to have a comparison between the different farms. 

 What tells whether a man is making money on a farm or not, 

 and how does -one farm compare with another? In order to 

 make that comparison, we must have some general basis, and 

 that is the labor income. I am going to show you some figures 

 and you must get this labor income fairly fixed in mind or you 

 won't understand the results of this work. 



Labor .income means the amount of money the man has 

 made after paying all his expenses, that is, all his expenses of 

 running the farm, and interest on all working capital, not only 

 land, but horses and tools and machinery. In other words, it is 



