ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



55 



ber 23rd. As I passed her I said. ' Good morning Mrs. Blank, I suppose 

 you are out buying Christmas presents this morning." "No," she said, 

 "it's too hard times to buy Christmas presents this year; the creamery 

 don't pay enough for the milk." Now that woman keeps nine cows, 

 and the creamery paid her $250.00 in a year for the milk she sent to it. 

 This is between $25.00 and $35.00 per cow per year that she receives, 

 and she never once thinks that it is the cow's fault, or her own fault, 

 that she does not get more money but according to her way of thinking, 

 —and there are others that are of the same opinion — the fault lies in the 

 price of butter, the creamery management, or the hard times. 



There is such a tendency in human nature "to look out and not in," 

 as the Sunday school teacher use to tell us; to think that the causes of 

 our hard lot are all outside our own door-yard instead of in it; that we 

 are sometimes helped by being reminded that a little investigation at 

 home may be a profitable undertaking. This sort of an inquiry would be 

 very helpful to many farmers, if they tan be led to realize what a differ- 

 ence there is in the earning capacity of the cows in their own herds, and 

 then be induced to part with those that eat more than they produce; 

 when they have done this the prices of butter and the "hard times*' will 

 not be continually worrying them. There's nothing like the inspiration of 

 playing a winning game to make us forget our troubles, and this being 

 true, the most cheerful clairymaan ought to be the one who knows the 

 most about his cows. 



It was with the hope of helping creamery patrons and of illustrating 

 the conditions of some dairy herds to the dairy interests of that state 

 that we undertook, some four years ago, to begin testing the cows of the 

 patrons supplying milk to the Wiccnsin Dairy School. These patrons 

 keep cows and deliver milk to the factory in the same way as is custo- 

 mary at the creameries and cheese factories throughout the state. They 

 do not have large herds, and it was observed during the past year that 

 the cows owned by one hundred of them were probably similar to the one 

 million in the state. Only eight out of one hundred patrons kept more 



