ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN’S ASSOCIATION. 
17 
bv a concert of action on the part of grocerymen. No one dealer, however 
fully he may realize the importance of such action, can alone adopt the 
plan of buying butter on its merits, since it would inevitably result in 
diminishing his trade by more than one-half. But by unison of action, 
and the adoption of a system of inspection sanctioned by law, by which 
the grade of every tub of butter should be determined before it is offered 
for sale, and the employment of inspectors of known ability and integrity 
an untold amount of good might be done, and thousands of dollars added 
to the annual income of the dairymen of Illinois. The trade would 
then become educational, and hundreds of people would be taught what 
they do not now know, viz.: that they are not making, neither do they 
know how to make a good quality of butter. 
Conventions like this would multiply, old cellars would be cleaned out, 
the cows would be giyen a good bed of straw, the churn would get an extra 
scalding, milk containing manure would be thrown to the pigs, the scales 
would be used in salting butter, proper dairy rooms would be built, and the 
amount of soap-grease put upon the market in butter tubs, would be 
reduced to a minimum. Until some system is adopted by the country and 
small city grocerymen, which will insure the recognition of quality in 
butter, the successful dairyman must seek some other market. Many good 
butter makers have already learned this, and others will not be slow in 
following their example. 
One of the first requisites to a high degree and certainty of success, is 
a complete knowledge of one s own business affairs. It is not sufficient 
that we should know that our income during a certain year has been one 
thousand dollars more than our expenses. But that it may continue to be 
so, or improve, it is necessary that we should know the exact source of each 
dollar of income. The almost wonderful success of many of the dairy farms 
in and around Elgin, is not so much because they have had a good market 
for their milk. Almost any farmer in Illinois may realize nearly or quite 
as much per gallon for milk as those can who are within three miles of the 
Elgin Milk Condensing Company. The success of these dwellers in Elgin 
is not so much, I say, because they can get ten cents a gallon for their milk in 
summer, and thirteen cents in winter, as it is because circumstances have forced 
them to see the relation between feed and milk. They have thoroughly 
learned the fact of which many of the farmers in Illinois are at present 
ignorant, that the more a cow can be made to eat and digest, the more 
profitable does the animal become. They have learned what nineteen- 
twentieths of the farmers of Illinois do not believe, that to leave corn 
standing in the field until it is time to husk and crib it, is a wasteful 
