ILLINOIS dairymen's ASSOCIATION. 23 



lowing them to be satisfied with pork at $4.00 and $4.50, or attempt to raise 

 gram at prices that do not pay. Our object is to get them to see that their 

 salvation as a farming community, and the way to raise off the debts from 

 their farms, is in this milk-produciog business; and that, instead of doing it 

 in a half way, they should at once set themselves to work in a wholesale way. 

 And, after they have a biitter and cheese factory started near, the patronage 

 increases, and it pays to keep milking twelve months in the year, instead of 

 letting their cows run round the straw stacks, dry, six months in the year, 

 and eating their heads off. The kind of a dairy that pays is the twelve 

 months in the year dairy, and no other kind of dairy pays, and never will. 



Mr Eice: In the county where I live there have been a dozen cheese 

 factories starred in fifteen vears, and all of them have gone down. The farm- 

 ers found they must have their milk to raise their calves. In a community 

 of small farmers of a mixed, husbandry, I believe, as Mr. Buell says, that is 

 the locality for cream gathefring. 



Secretary McGlincy: This question of cream gathering is an impor- 

 tant one, I think the gathered cream system will be introduced in the Elgin 

 district for the reason that, within an area of fifteen miles of Elgin there are 

 80,000 cows, and the loss of these cows is 10 per cent per annum ; 8,000 cows 

 have got to be introduced into that section every twelve months. Our farm- 

 ers do not raise their calves ; they deliver their milk at the factory or ship it to 

 Chicago, and they have nothing to feed the calves. We have to depend upon 

 Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and counties in Illinois outside of the dairy belt 

 to get our supplies from. Until we introduce the gathered cream system, and 

 have the skim left for the calves, we shall have to buy. We are paying, on 

 the average, $42.50 per head for car-load lots, for 8 000 cows a year. You 

 can figure up where the farmer's money goes. They have largely adopted the 

 cream gathering system through Minnesota and Iowa, because it assures 

 them a certain amount from their cows for cream sold, and they yet have the 

 skim milk left on the farm to feed to the calves and pigs. But I found that 

 in portions of those states the cows were milked six months in the year; the 

 cows were without shelter, except such as they could get on the south side of 

 a barbed wire fence, with little feed, coming in in the spring in poor condi- 

 tion, so that the net profit of those cows was not as much as we would expect 

 to get for a sheep. There must be some gent'eman here who can give us 

 some figures on this subject of gathered cream that would throw some light 

 on it. 



Mr. Gurler : I would like to give a few figures. Last season, in pre- 

 paring a paper for a convention similar to this, I took ten of our patrons for 

 one week in each month, and found what they received for their cream from 

 one hundred pounds of milk. Our business is conducted in such a way that 

 I could tell. Our cans are 8i inch setters. It took three of them to make 

 one hundred pounds of milk. I conducted my experiment very carefully. I 

 took our whole milk dividend for each month, d^-ducted twenty-five cents 

 from it— fifteen cents for the difference in value of the milk with and with- 

 out the cream, and ten cents for delivering the milk at the factory, before I 

 compared it with the gathered cream, and the difference in favor of the 

 whole milk was from 10 to 60 per cent. I think, also, that when you can get 

 seven, eight, and nine cents for skim cheese, you cannot afford to feed it to 



