gS ILLINOIS DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



with the subject than I am. At Elgin, Ilhnois, when the butter 

 board opens each Monday noon there are from 50 to 150 people 

 present — men who have butter to sell and men who have come to 

 buy, owners of creameries, representatives of commission houses, 

 brokers acting for big wholesale houses in other cities, and those 

 Vvho are engaged in the export business. All butter is graded 

 according to its quality by arbitrary rules for the protection of 

 the trade. The proprietor of a creamery who has a quantity of 

 butter to sell offers so many pounds, just as an operator on the 

 board of trade oft'ers wheat, oats or corn for sale. Other proprie- 

 tors do the same and the buyers bid for it. Each bid is recorded 

 by the secretary and the dealers keep tab in a little note book. At 

 :3 :oO o'clock ]). m. the offering and bidding closes, then the secre- 

 tary calls for final bids, and asks each seller if he accepts the offer 

 that has been made by the buyer for his butter. Some of them 

 accept the bids and some decline and a record is made of all pur- 

 chases. Then the quotation committee, which consists of five 

 members of the board, elected by their colleagues, retire to an 

 adjoining room with a statement of the prices bid and the prices 

 accepted and draw an average, taking into consideration all 

 phases of the situation — the condition of the market, the cattle, 

 the pastures, and all other circumstances — and within a few min- 

 utes report to the open board what in their judgment is a fair 

 price, and that is the rate for the rest of the week. 



The surrounding country within a radius of 75 to 100 miles 

 from Chicago is fast becoming a great dairy country on account 

 of the facilities to ship milk from the dairies into the city of 

 Chicago. Now you can see train loads of twenty-five cars, with 

 200 cans of milk to the car, start in the morning and make the 

 circuit around over the different railroads in the northern part 

 of Illinois, especially in a northerly direction from Chicago. 

 The arrivals of the milk trains at the depots are on schedule time, 

 and the milk trains are treated with the same consideration that 

 the passenger trains are by the railroad officials. 



The largest condensed milk plant in the world is at Dixon, 

 Illinois, where over 3,000,000 pounds of milk a day is handled. 



