THIRTY-SIXTH ANNUAL CONVENTION. 27 



association, they organize themselves into a society and agree 

 to pay a dollar a cow per year. For this dollar they hire a man, 

 an expert dairyman, whose business it is to go around from farm 

 to farm. He comes to each farm once a month, in the afternoon 

 he sees the feeding done, and weighs the feed. He sees the milk- 

 ing done and weighs the milk and takes a sample thereof for 

 testing. He repeats that performance in the morning. From 

 these figures he estimates how much feed the cow ate for the last 

 month and the cost of the feed, and he finds out how much milk 

 the cow gave last month and how much butter fat there was in 

 the milk. Knowing this and knowing the market price of butter 

 fat, he knows how much the income from every cow was for the 

 last month. Doing this twelve times during the year, he will 

 have a fairly accurate estimate of how much the cow ate, how 

 much it cost to keep her, and how much the cow returns for the 

 money expended on her. He will know how much it cost to pro- 

 duce a pound of butter with every one of his cows, how much it 

 cost to produce a hundred pounds of milk, how much the cow 

 returned for every dollar's worth of feed expended on her, and 

 so on. 



Now, you may say that it is not sufficient to test the milk 

 once a month, and yet if you will look up statistics of any exper- 

 ment station where they have kept daily records of their herd for 

 a year, and from those records pick out every thirtieth day, 1 ake 

 the average and multiply that by 365, you will find that you will 

 come very close to the actual figures. They have tried that in 

 Denmark, and in no case were they three hundred pounds of niilic 

 out of the way. 



I believe there is need of something of that kind in this 

 country. Prof. McKay of Iowa reports that the average produc- 

 tion of butter fat per cow in Iowa does not exceed 140 pounds, 

 and from the records we have collected in this state, I am tempt- 

 ed to say that our cows are no better than the cows are in Iowa. 

 I wish to relate a little incident that happened last summer. I 

 went to a creamery and picked out promiscuously the names of 

 fifteen men from their books and found out how much milk and 



