ILl^INOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 127 



have been laboring with a lot of heathens down where Grout lives, and 

 when I talk dairying to them down there, they commence laughing, and 

 say I have made an unfortunate mistake. "We tried dairying here; we 

 had a creamery here and it lost $6, 000, and we haven't heard a man say cow 

 since." I told them cows were their salvation. 



I am glad to see a convention like this in the State of Illinois, gladder 

 than to see it in any other State in the Union. There is hope for Illinois 

 agriculturists yet. 



In regard to the possibilities of dairying, I might take all afternoon on 

 that subject. I will make my talk into two different parts. 



The first man I will talk to is the special purpose dairyman. By that 

 I mean the man who iSi in dairying for the milk and the butter, and who 

 buys: all or part of his feed. The man on the small farm. The man whose 

 father kept cows before he was married, and married a dairyman's daugh- 

 ter, and they talked cow, and talked cow until the boy became, by inheri- 

 tance and influence, a dairyman. That man wants the special purpose 

 cow. He has no business with any other. He has no business with that 

 until he learns some first principles. 



One is to figure out what each cow is worth by weighing the milk and 

 testing it, weighing the feed and feeding out what he is doing. Otherwise, 

 he is groping in the dark. I don't think that man ever lived that could tell 

 to an absolute certainty what a cow was worth until he tried it. Unless 

 possibly it might be Norton in Iowa, who has a herd of double purpose 

 cows 330 to 380 butter fat in a year. Norton is, however, one man in a 

 hundred. There are probably a few in Wisconsin. One in Kansas said 

 he could pick out a cow. So he sat down with his eight cows and figured 

 and then give us scale and Babco ck test, and he hit it on the first a^d 

 last and missed every other one, and, by the way, don't you forget it, 

 Kansas is going to be one of the great dairy states of the union by and by. 



I think it is possible to almost double the quantity of butter from the 

 cows, even those kept on special purpose dairy farms. You must not 

 only know what you are doing, but know how to feed. Of the dozens who 

 write me in the winter season what's the matter with the feed for their 



