48 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION 



SO many good men who have started into the dairy business and 

 bought one or two, or ten, or maybe twenty head of purebred 

 dairy cattle and they paid a magnificent price for their cattle, 

 enough to buy a splendid dairy animal, and they got nothing but 

 a dairy scrub. That is the experience of a very great number. 

 If I were back 20 years and I wanted to buy a good dairy heifer 

 purebred of any breed of cattle, I would no more buy this heifer 

 myself than nothing in the world after my experience, but I 

 would go to some good man in whom I had confidence and 

 whom I thought was a splendid judge of that kind of dairy cat- 

 tle, and get him to help me select it until I learned something 

 myself, and that is the only safe course, my friends, if you are 

 going to start. Even in the selection of a head of the herd the 

 same thing is true. You can buy graded stock but when you go 

 to buy purebred stock you had better be just a little careful and 

 get somebody to help you, — when you pay $500 or $1,000 a 

 head. 



I want to say to you people that this statement of mine at 

 the outset about your soil and about your dairying is made with 

 the intention of convincing you, if I can, that you want to go to 

 dairying in Illinois in order to maintain your soil fertility, and if 

 you dairy on your farm your soil will grow better and richer 

 instead of poorer. I might use a personal illustration. When I 

 bought that little farm of mine 25 years ago and later found thai? 

 others could not make it pay I started to farm it myself, and 

 then tried to raise cattle and I never made a dollar on stock 

 raising, then I tried dairying and succeeded fairly well. That 

 farm lies within two miles of town, it is just at the outskirts of 

 the timber — we are near the head of the Des Moines River; it 

 is a little inclined to be rolling, not very much, but a little, and it 

 was one of the earliest settled farms in the county. Here was 

 a typical early settlers farm and they just farmed it and never 

 put anything back on it and I thought one piece of land was just 

 as good as another, just like many lawyers, and I could not raise 

 over 25 bushels of corn to the acre to save my neck, and after 

 fifteen years of the dairy cow on that farm I can raise 85 bushels 

 of corn on an acre just as nice as can be. That is the situation 

 in a nutshell of the dairy cow. I would like to give you some of 

 the details about it, but that is the situation in a nutshell. I have 



