ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN’S ASSOCIATION. 15 
jour butter product will not be sufficiently uniform to command the highest 
market price. 
Do }ou make good butter and sell it at a grocery where the price paid 
depends quite as much upon the amount of groceries you are in the habit 
of purchasing, as upon the quality of your butter ? 
Do you trade with a man that handles butter only “ to accommodate 
the farmer,” and to draw trade, and who is quite well satisfied if the profit 
on your butter cancels the loss on your neighbor’s grease—only provided 
he gets a good grocery trade from both of you ? Then you do not exercise 
that skill in disposing of your product that is commensurate with the skill 
employed in your dairy room, or with that which the groceryman exercises. 
If you habitually make poor butter, I can honestly recommend to you 
the corner grocery, as the very best place to dispose of it. But if your 
butter is first-class, and uniformly so, try the Elgin Board of Trade; or at 
least, find a man to deal with who has no goods that he expects to sell to 
you or to your neighbor, and he will probably be willing to buy the butter 
on its merits. 
The grocerymen are often loud in their complaints concerning the 
quality of the butter brought to them by the average farmer. I have been 
repeatedly told by them that not one-fifth of the butter marketed is first- 
class. 
But the majority of farmers will not stop making poor butter; this 
condition of things will continue in spite of Agricultural Schools and 
Daiiymen s Conventions, in spite of the earnest and truthful statements so 
often appearing in the dairy column of our agricultural papers, in spite of 
all that may be said, and written, and invented by the Willards, the Arnolds, 
the Morrows, the Warrings, the Hardins, and the Cooleys, this condition of 
things will continue until the grocerymen shall be induced or forced to stop 
offering a premium for salvey, frowey, streaked, buttermilky butter. 
If this Convention desires to promote the dairy interests of Illinois, 
if it desires to improve the quality of the butter manufactured in the 
numerous small dairies of this State, if it desires not simply the success of 
its individual members, but the enlightenment and consequent success of 
its brother farmers, who are at home, and whose forms never darken the 
door of an assembly like this, if it is ambitious that the reputation of 
western butter shoukFbe improved, let it make an earnest, a vigorous, and 
a direct attack upon the grocerymen and their method of dealing with 
butter makers. 
I am confident that the average quality of Illinois butter might be 
