LLINOIS DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



113 



It took me al30ut three months by reachng at night when op- 

 portunity afforded to study the greater part of "Feeds and Feed- 

 ing'' which my cousin had recommended to me as l^eing a ^'ery 

 good book. To start with I borrowed a copy of him. '^The 

 Breeder's Gazette" and "Hoard's Dairymen" have iDcen coming 

 to me, ever since I started that book. I soon found that the forty 

 cows we were milking, did not yield enough returns, when com- 

 pared with reports of other herds, and my interest was aroused. 



We had milked in the old fashioned way. All the farm 

 hands, good and bad milkers, started at one end of a row of cows 

 and milked the cow^s just as they came to them until that row was 

 finished ; and then on to the next row. A\nien I wanted to know 

 what a particular cow was yielding I had hard work to find out 

 and then could not get accurate information, so I gave each man 

 certain cows to milk. The milk yield increased at once. 



By the 1st of March, 11)02, I had all the cows numbered and 

 had found an old four bottle Babcock tester. We saved compos- 

 ite tests for a week. From Mr. H. B. Curler's "American Dairy- 

 ing," I had gathered some information on testing milk and so 

 went at it with a great deal of awe and against l^ig odds. The 

 foreman of the farm, who had l)een employed by my father for a 

 great many years and live other old employes could not stand the 

 idea of weighing and testing milk, only two of the farm crew of 

 eight stood oy me. 



During the March, 1902, the forty cows which were in all 

 stages of lactation, most of them fresh in the early fall and win- 

 ter, averaged: 450.4 pounds of milk, average test 4.2 per cent, 

 average pounds butter fat 19 pounds. Figiiring as Mr. Curler 

 had recommended I estimated that the average yearly record for 

 the herd, or 8.4 months would be about 8,459 pounds of milk, 159 

 pounds of fat, and increasing by j4> they would yield 179 pounds 

 of butter. 



Our feed was costing us about 23 cents a day for each cow. 

 The forty cows were averaging about two gallons of milk per 

 day. You see our milk was costing us, to produce it, about 11 

 cents per gallon, besides the cost of labor which amounted to about 



