THIRTY-EIGHTH ANNUAL CONVENTION 85 



your efforts is the production of milk and butter fat. Conse- 

 quently, these records are all important, and they are a guide 

 or an index showing what you are able to do, or what will 

 be accomplished by your efforts, in breeding dairy cattle. 



The pedigree of your dairy animals is valuable or not 

 valuable according to the extent of the records which it con- 

 tains. If a pedigree for six generations shows a great many 

 good records, demonstrating that the animals which make up this 

 pedigree have been valuable and large producers, or show yard 

 winners, or good breeding animals, whichever the case may be, 

 the pedigree is valuable. On the other hand, if the pedigree con- 

 tains no animals — or if the history related by the pedigree shows 

 that no animals in that pedigree have ever done anything worthy 

 of note the pedigree is absolutely worthless, except from the 

 standpoint of demonstrating the purity of the blood. 



One of the laws of breeding, which is most familiar to us all, 

 is that "Like begets like, or a likeness thereof." When we have 

 animals whose pedigrees are made up of animals that have been 

 large producers at the pail and the churn, we can, with all 

 reason, expect that the offspring of these animals will also be 

 large producers of milk and butter fat. On the other hand, if 

 the pedigrees show no animals with records, we cannot, with 

 any degree of certainty, except record producing offspring. It 

 may be possible that some place back in the generations there 

 have been animals that have been large producers, though we 

 have no certainty of this, nor no guide as to their value, and 

 we have no guide as to what we can expect from the offspring 

 of such animals. 



I might say that over in Iowa, the farms in Illinois, in Min- 

 nesota, Nebraska and in most of our Western and Central West 

 states — the average cow, or the cow that is being milked on the 

 average farm — is not better, if as good, as the cows that were 

 being milked twenty-five years ago. 



Now, this being the case, there is something wrong. The 

 farmer of the Central West, I believe, is one of the most intel- 

 ligent farmers of the world and he has made great progress in 

 the past twenty-five years. As was said by somebody else, he 



