Dairy Economics-The Economy of Dairy

Practice.

BY HON. W. D. HOARD.

Mr. President and Gentlemen-In the progress of all industrial thought there seems to be a stage of evolution. You take the first settlement of Wisconsin, and all of its agricultural processes were crude. This crudeness was made up by the fertility in our soil, which answered with a harvest even to the very crude tickling with a hoe. Then when we finally evolved from the crude farming and grain-growing into the more elaborate farming of animal husbandry, into dairy farming, our first processes and our first efforts were marked again by crudeness. A large degree of easy-going, shiftless thought and management came over with the change, and the idea of the profit that should come to man from a clear, close study of the economy of the business was not entertained, and I may say that this proposition applies all over this Union to a very large number of men. Men to-day are making milk in New Jersey as expensively as they ever did, and the thought that there is a large profit in a more careful study of the economics of the business is not entertained by a great many who are in business.

Now my talk to-day will be the general treatment of dairy economics, and I want to call attention to some specific ideas and principles. As a teacher, it may be said, in this department, I have been obliged in the nature of things in my own practice, and in my advice to others, to hammer things down closely to their ultimate result.

No piece of machinery ever went onto the farm or into a factory that is half so delicate or complicated as the cow. Inside and out she is a bundle of mysterious forces, putting the wisest man to his trumps to manage her to a profit.

Blind, stupid management when she is a heifer will ruin her future. I once had a Jersey cow that brought me three heifer calves. The

first I handled in a way I thought would be conducive to the making a good cow of her, and she proved a good cow. The next was a heifer, and I handled and fed so as to make her beefy; developed the tendency to flesh and kept down the tendency to develop the maternal organs. Consistent with my idea of the thing, she proved to be worthless as a milker, but she would produce good heifers when well mated, because of the dairy heredity in her. The third heifer I handled as I did the first, and she proved to be a good cow.

Now this to me was a conclusive demonstration that the making of the cow is very much in the wisdom of her handling from calf-hood to maternity. Start her right, give her the right kind of a father and mother and grandmother and grandfather back of her; with all that in her favor, even, you can spoil her, and it was proved to me, and it has proved true in thousands of instances that I have observed.

The dairy farmer stands at the switch. He can send one cow down this track and that one down another. How important, then, that he know what he is about, that he put into his business all the good judgment and intelligence he can. How important that he know enough to know that he needs to "know a heap" about cows, if he is to manage his own business wisely.

There is no more interesting field in which to study the finer economies of business than on the dairy farm.

The broad-minded, well-posted dairy farmer sees it. To illustrate: The cow-but she must be a good one-stands in the position of a machine to work up the coarser products of the farm into the finer products of the dairy. It is estimated that a bushel of oats, if fed to a good cow, will produce three pounds of butter. Is there any market for oats that you know of that can beat this?

And I have neighbors who draw oats to the market and sell them for twenty-five cents a bushel, when butter is twenty-five cents a pound, and I have asked those men if they would give fifty cents for a dollar greenback, and they have looked at me in astonishment.

The corn-plant is a compound of stalk and ear. Forty per cent. of the food value of the plant, if harvested at the right time, is in the stalk; well-cured corn-fodder, cut when the ear is fairly glazed, is worth as much for butter production, ton for ton, as the best timothy hay. Do you know of any market for corn-stalks that can beat a good cow? The whole plant, ear and all, if put into a silo at the right stage, stands in relation to timothy hay for butter-making in the