238 WISCONSIN STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
northwest. My recollection reaches back to the early settlement 
of Wisconsin, and my experience as a dairyman reaches back fully 
twenty-five years. I then made cheese and sold it for five cents 
per pound. I had cheese on exhibition at the first State Fair 
’ held in Wisconsin, and after the fair, sold it in Janesville for six 
cents per pound, and thought I was getting a very high price. 
But it is the dairy history since the organization of the factory 
system of which I design more especially to speak. 
The rapid growth of the dairy interest in the northwest is a 
matter ’of surprise to many. I am not able to give exact figures 
in regard to the development of this interest in the west, but ap¬ 
proximate them nearly. At the second meeting of this Associa¬ 
tion, held in Belvidere, Ill., in 1867, not more than thirty factories 
were represented, and that I think was about the number in the 
territory now embraced by this Association, and now Wisconsin 
alone has had in operation the past season more than 100 factories, 
with a fair prospect of increasing the number to 150, the coming 
season. I think it safe to put down Illinois as equal in numbers 
to Wisconsin, and Iowa and Minnesota at 25 each, making in all 
250 factories in operation in the northwest the past season, and 
this number is likely to be increased at least 100 the coming 
season. 
In view of the rapid multiplication of cheese and butter facto¬ 
ries, and the large diversion of capital and labor from grain rais¬ 
ing and other agricultural pursuits to dairying, many persons have 
feared that the business was to be over-done, and the result would 
be that the prices of dairy goods would go so low as to leave no 
profit to the dairyman. 
That the predictions of these fearful ones have not been fulfilled 
in the past, we all well know. True, the low prices of July and 
August of ’71 caused some fears among dairymen that more 
cheese was being made than could be sold at paying prices. But 
the result of the fall trade clearly proved that such was not the 
case, but that the low prices were owing, in good part, to our own 
folly and mismanagement in putting our goods upon the market 
in too large quantities, at the wrong time. 
And the question is still asked, with a good deal of earnestness, 
“ Is there no danger, seeing so many are turning their- attention to 
