1 June, 1898. ] QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. 453 
Dairying. 
Wuen a man can cause the public to think on any subject pertaining to the 
welfare of their business, whether by writing to the Press or by lecturing, or 
better still by his example, that man is doing a service to his country. ‘There 
are men who say dairying does not pay. Others, on the contrary, maintain 
that few industries pay the farmer so well as: dairying. Both are right. 
Dairying will never pay some people, whilst to others it will bring prosperity 
and comfortable incomes and homes. ¢ : 
There are three great principles which make for, success in dairy farming. 
These are: Breed, feed, and trouble. Breed from the best milking strains 
procurable. Get a sire with a milking strain record, one whose ancestors have 
a bond fide milk record, Breed from the best cows in the herd, and as soon as 
you find that a cow cannot make butter enough to reduce the cost of produc- 
tion to an undoubted paying point weed out that cow. Feed the good ones on 
food that has as much bulk as possible, yet full of nutritious matter, such as 
ensilage or corn that has been field-cured.. Some people will say their land 
won’t grow corn. ‘That means that they won’t grow corn. They have 10 acres 
of land, and they get together thirty or forty scrubby cows, which they turn 
out on to the roads to pick up the living which the dairy farmer (?) 
should supply for them. There is very little land so poor on a farm that it 
cannot be made to produce corn, uot marketable as grain, but good for the 
silo. Teosinte; the millets, and a variety of fodder crops can be grown on 
poor land with the help of manure and labour. No man who will not feed his 
cattle has a right to keep any. In the wheat districts, bran is always 
procurable, and it is an excellent food for producing milk. Roots, such as 
mangolds, grow well in Queensland, and can, with a little trouble, be produced 
on most soils (excepting, of course, on sour undrained flats, sandy or rocky 
soils). But take the ordinary kind of land occupied by the selector of eighty 
or 160 acres, and' there is bound to be some of it fit, if properly handled, to 
grow crops suitable for cattle feed. 
Study the food question and feed intelligently, and do not jump to 
conclusions that dairy farming will not pay, because you have allowed it to 
cost you 8d. or 10d. per lb. to make your butter. 
Handle the good cows as they should be handled. Give them plenty of 
wholesome food to eat, good water to drink, bedding to lie upon during cold 
winter nights, and paddocks with sheltering trees to pick in during the day. 
Use a Babcock milk-tester on them all at intervals during the year, and find 
out thus what they are doing. Use a separator to skim the milk, and get all 
the butter fat out of the milk, instead of leaving 1 1b. of fat in every 100 Ib. 
of skim milk, as is done in the old system of setting the milk and taking oft 
the cream with a skimmer; 1 lb. of fat left in the skim milk is worth 10d,, 
and that is lost. No wonder it costs some so-called dairymen 10d. per lb. to 
produce butter. : ; 
5 Some will say that it does not matter if a quantity of butter fat is left in 
the skim milk, because the calves and pigs get the benefit of it; but a man 
eannot know much about his business if he thinks it will pay to feed pigs on 
food worth 10d. per lb. 
Now, as to the man who produces butter at a cost of 10d. or 8d. per lb. 
The butter made by that man is most likely to fetch only 4d. or 5d. in the 
market, owing to his careless and old-fashioned manipulation. To figure the 
whole thing out in a business-like way :— 
For argument’s sake, let us assume that it costs in Queensland £6 5s. per 
annum to keep an average cow, provided she is fed and housed as she should be 
fed and housed. How much butter will this cow produce in the year? That 
