FORTt-THIRD ANNUAL CONVENTION 33 



You have to keep good cows and the question is how to get 

 them. Well, you can buy them in some good dairy section, but 

 the fact is they are hard to buy. If you go out to buy cows that 

 produce 400 pounds of butterfat you will find that the farmer 

 owning them will want to keep them. If you want good cows, 

 you must raise them yourself. If you are going to get cows of 

 the 400 pound or 500 pound standard, don't try to buy them, 

 but get a high class bull to head your herd and raise them. Get 

 a bull from high producing stock even if he costs you a couple 

 of hundred dollars. If you consider that the sire furnishes 

 fifty per cent of the blood of the offspring of your herd and that 

 he contributed as much as all the cows combined, you see how 

 much more important the bull is than the cow. If we are work- 

 ing with cows, for instance, that produce 200 pounds of butter- 

 fat and want to get 300 pounds, we have to buy a good bull in 

 order to get beyond that 200 pound mark. And if we want bet- 

 ter stock still, we must buy still higher class sires in order to 

 keep up this building process. It is remarkable to see in how 

 many cases a good sire has actually doubled the production of 

 the daughters over the dams. 



There are some reasons why we don't use better dairy sires, 

 or why the average man is so careless in the selection of the sire. 

 In the first place, he does not figure what an increase of from 15 

 to 20 pounds of butterfat from each of his cows in the whole 

 herd for several years would mean toward paying for a $200 

 bull. When a man says that $200 for a sire is more than he 

 can afford, I am ready to say that he has not given the question 

 of a dairy sire the attention that he ought to. The only kind 

 that I would buy would be one that has a high producing dam 

 behind him, and also the same kind of a dam back of his sire, 

 and then good records as far back as you can get them. These 

 records should be known, there should be no guessing about it. 

 I would put as much time on the selection of a bull as I would 

 upon all other things combined, because we cannot take the 

 chance of starting in with poor ones. 



If you are going to buy the kind of a sire that is really val- 

 uable, you are going to handle him so as to make him useful for as 

 many years as you can, and get the best out of him while you 

 have him. Some people think they have to change bulls every 



