THIRTY-SIXTH ANNUAL CONVENTION. 25 



COWS in the great state of Iowa, and he has found that the butter 

 production from the average cow in Iowa to have been 140 

 pounds in a year. One hundred and forty pounds of butter in a 

 year per cow. Now, then, that buter at twenty cents a pound 

 will give a gross income of $28 from a cow a year, to say nothing 

 about the calf or skim-milk, $28 for her feed. We figure the calf 

 and skim-milk probably would pay for the care she received. 

 Now, I believe that those records also show it costs about that 

 to keep a cow, consequently the farmer has not had anything for 

 his investment, and he has done all that for fun, just for the sake 

 of having something to do. 



Those conditions, at that time in Denmark, led up to the 

 formation of this dairy test association. The Danish people are 

 just like the American people, they are not in business just for 

 fun; they have to make some money — there is no great life in- 

 surance company in Denmark that they can become directors of 

 and get rich in a short time; they have to work hard for every- 

 thing they get. If a crop failed, if the oat crop failed, or the 

 wheat crop or anything of that kind failed, you would see any 

 number of farmers go bankrupt and have to leave their farms, 

 so they found they would have to learn whether they had good 

 cows and find some way of distinguishing between the poor cows 

 and the good ones, because they could not afford to keep the poor 

 cows. It costs as much to keep a poor cow as a good one, and 

 they had to have some reliable means of finding the good cow 

 from the poor one. 



In this country, at the present time, we have those means at 

 hand. We have the Babcock tester and any dairymna, any farm- 

 er could find out for himself the production of his own cows. 



As I said, in Denmark the condition was the same ten or fif- 

 teen years ago, and the government found out that if a man did 

 not do that for himself, they might, by organizing an association 

 and getting the farmers to club together, they could get that done 

 in a more reliable way and a more systematic way. At that time 

 they did not have Babcock testers. They had other tests, but 

 the apparatus was so expensive the ordinary farmers could not 



