22 ILLINOIS DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



Dairying is not a small business in any sense that you can 

 look at it. I do not think there is another industry on the farm 

 that calls in mind, in play, the thinking facilities as does dairying. 

 You may think any one can milk a cow and haul it down to the 

 condenser and sell it. Possibly it is true, but all do not make 

 what they should out of the business. Why do they not ? They 

 have not quite learned that dairying is an educational science 

 and requires the qualification of thorough study and preparation 

 for financial results. 



A man can, I believe, make something out of hogs in feeding 

 them. You get an income from those hogs twice a year as the 

 market may present itself to you. Other lines of industry may 

 be followed and bring in an income, but there is nothing that 

 brings in the steady monthly or weekly income, or, as it does 

 sometimes, daily income, as the dairy cow. 



The dairy cow herself is an animal, or a machine you might 

 call her, that requires study. The dairyman has to know first 

 what a good cow is, to know, second, how to take care of the 

 cow, and third, how best to dispose of the products of his herd. 

 It requires more study, more thorough study of the cow nature 

 and principles of breeding to select a good dairy cow than any 

 other livestock. It isn't a study that can be slurred over, but 

 must be thought out all along* these lines. You know the think- 

 ing men are the better men of the nation. In the dairying com- 

 munity we find there the most enlightened. More learning along 

 agricultural science, the more interest in the affairs of the state 

 and nation. We know dairy farm producers are better off 

 financially. You may go south from here into the belt known 

 as the cotton section of the United States and you can look 

 over the conditions of affairs there where six hundred millions 

 of raw cotton are taken from the land of the farmers south. 

 What has it done? Impoverished the people and land instead 

 of making them rich. They have been cropping year after year 

 the same land in cotton until today their land does not produce 

 what it did fifty to one hundred years ago. They can't produce 



