The Wisconsin Dairymen.
The papers and discussions at Lake Mills comprehended quite a range of topics, and they were handled with marked ability. Three of the essays have now appeared in The Prairie Farmer in full. They were too good to slaughter by abridgment, and the same remark applies to other papers, yet our space is too limited for an unabridged report.
THE ROAD TO THE FACTORY,
by Robt. Fargo, showed the people how much they are losing by persisting in having poor roads, when by a small expense they might have good ones. The road tax is improperly applied. He thought that a good gravel road in most localities could be made for $1,000 per mile, the road-bed to be graveled one foot deep and twelve feet wide.
CANADA VS. WISCONSIN.
Mr. Harris’ paper, printed in last week’s Farmer, elicited considerable discussion. Members desired to know if, in the essayist’s opinion, Canadian dairy management was superior to that of the States, and especially of Wisconsin. The reply was in the affirmative. There seems to be more thoroughness on the part of Canadian dairymen. They have no better grass, nor water, nor cows. They discriminate more rigidly between good and bad patrons. They sometimes bring the law to bear against those who water milk or skim it. The factories there are mostly owned by stock companies. When tainted milk is discovered in the vat, it is traced back as soon as possible to its source, and the patron bringing it is excluded. The law there is similar to that in New York and was founded upon that law. Mr. Fish related an instance where a fraudulent patron in Herkimer county, N. Y., had been detected, sued, and heavily fined for his practices. Mr. Harris said as inspector of factories, he always refused to receive milk from cows allowed to feed on slough grass or drink stagnant water. Such milk would always prevent the manufacture of good cheese. He wants no milk from cows forced to feed on marshes. When a man applies to a factory to sell his milk, he looks the man over, he visits his farm, he looks at the stables and all the surroundings, and he can generally tell whether or not it is safe to receive that man’s milk.
COMPETITION.
It cropped out in this discussion that in some parts of Wisconsin and Illinois there are too many factories. Competition leads factorymen to often receive milk that should be discarded. To offend a man by enforcing strict cleanliness, non-skimming, and stripping was to drive him to a neighboring factory and his custom is lost. It is hard to make owners of cows honest when dishonest or selfish factorymen encourage them in selfish and fraudulent ways. Mr. Harris said at some of the best Canadian factories patrons were refused the privilege of taking home the whey in their milk cans. He would have no objection to their taking the whey if all would cleanse their cans properly. But this could not be depended upon.
WATER IN MILK.
He detects water in milk by means of a little German instrument called Horren’s Milk Tester, patented in Hanover. They cost fifty cents each by the 100. They are for sale by Cornish & Curtis, Ft. Atkinson, Wis., and by some others of the dairy supply concerns. This little instrument is invaluable to the factoryman.
PRIDE IN BUSINESS.
Another thing about the Canadians is they take such pride in their business that they are not given to adulterating their butter and cheese. They make a cheese that sells as the best cheddar in the English markets. The best Wisconsin cheese that Mr. Harris saw at the Milwaukee dairy fair was several points below the best Canadian article. The difference lies in the want of skill in the maker, and the greed of the patrons which often leads them to skim and to withhold the strippings.
SKIMMING.
There were those present who claimed that more money can be realized by making both butter and cheese than from cheese alone, though its quality makes it bring a higher price. So long as this is the case such will continue to make skim cheese. They say a man must be governed by the market he is to supply. If one makes for a home market where skim cheese is liked it is all right to make butter from the same milk. It was replied that as our dairymen in general must look abroad for their market, that good, straight, full cream cheese is bound to win in the long run. When the foreign market for the Wisconsin product is destroyed it will take years of honest effort to rebuild the old reputation.
THE CHEDDAR.
The cheddar cheese of Canada is made by drawing off the whey while it is sweet, the curd being allowed to sour afterward. It takes too long to make this cheese to suit the Western cheese-maker. But you can not make the best cheese in a hurry. There is more nutriment in the cheddar than in the common cheese of the States.
BY THE ACRE.
Mr. Hiram Smith said in his paper that he computes his butter and cheese by the acre, meaning that his effort is to see how much dairy product he can get from an acre of ground. The herd of cows that can produce the most from a mow of hay or a given amount of pasturage is the best herd. That system which will take 1,000 lbs. of feed and get the most from it is the best system. He plows up about four acres of pasture every year, and proposes to reduce the acreage of his pasture thus gradually to the end. He grows feed for the cows on the acres plowed up. It is the cheapest method. He uses green feed, bran, straw, roots, etc. This gives the most milk at the least expense. He uses the submerging system of butter-making. A bushel basket full of pounded ice twice per day will keep milk cool regardless of weather. Cool the milk suddenly no matter what the system. Four pounds of butter from 100 pounds of milk is all he expects to get in summer. In fall, perhaps another pound, but it will not be of so high a grade.
THE HOLSTEINS.
Mr. Curtis, of New York, said a good word for the Holsteins as dairy stock. At the Cornell University farm they come in at two years, are milked seven or eight years, and then fattened for beef. He would not recommend this system for all breeds.
CALVES.
Mr. Northup said he can raise better calves on skimmed milk than on whole milk. Others agreed with him, and a few differed, asking what the Lord put the cream in milk for. Reply: to mix with butterine.
ITEMS.
Professor Henry mentioned some of the experiments now being carried on at the State University to show the value of different stock foods, tile, drainage, etc. He is feeding cotton seed meal, malt, sprouts, oil cake, ensilage, etc. Cotton seed meal induces a very rich flow of milk.
Mr. Smith thinks skimmed milk worth 35 cents per 100 pounds for cheese-making, for those who have a demand for that kind of cheese.
Mr. Favill, of Walworth county, set the teeth of the dairymen on edge, by asserting and proving by figures that he could make more money from same outlay in beef making in six months, than any of them could in a year from the dairy. Mr. F. will write out his experience in this line for The Prairie Farmer at an early day.
We cut short our notes of the discussions somewhat, to make room for Mr. Smith’s instructive essay on
NEGLECTED OPPORTUNITIES.
So long as it is true that the average yield, per cow, in milk that is taken to the factories is less rather than more than 3,000 pounds per season, and so long as it is true that there are dairymen whose cows yield from 4,000 to 5,000 pounds each per season, it will be easy to make it appear there are neglected opportunities on the part of most dairymen which, if availed of, would greatly augment the annual yield, and consequently make larger the profits.
One of the fundamental truths in stock-raising, and in profitable milk production, is, that it takes a given amount of food to support the animal’s existence in such a way that it will simply maintain its status; and that growth in flesh or yield in milk, above an evenly balanced existence, must come from the food given to cause an increase of weight in flesh, fat, or milk products. Hence, all the profit must come from that excess, and is large or small just in proportion as the animal is capacitated to utilize and digest it, within the bounds of healthy, judicious feeding. So that farmer was sound who, when he fed up to the very verge of that limit, and was told by a skeptic that he did not believe high feeding paid, replied he was only sorry that his cows could not healthfully digest more. The capital invested in the cows, in the soil, in the barns and stables, in the care and time devoted to milking and waiting on them, is very nearly the same, whether they produce 3,000 pounds each per season, or 5,000 pounds. At first it may be granted that if a farm is stocked to its capacity in feeding a herd of 3,000-pound cows, that some outside food must be imported from other soil to enable the same herd to yield 5,000 pounds each. But the enriching of the manure through high feeding, and the consequent enriching of the land, will soon obviate the necessity of the importation of outside food. If this is not true, I admit that my opinion is based on false premises; and that the opponents of high feeding have the best of the argument, as well as a majority of the disciples, and a majority of the thinly-covered bones of the so-called dairy stock of the State. In support of the idea that there is an added value to the manure through high feeding, it may be stated that there are many places in the Eastern States in which in estimating the earnings of the cow each year, that the milk, or butter and cheese, the calf and the pork are not only counted, but $10 per well-fed cow is added for the increased value she has put upon the soil, deposited it in a bank that never breaks. What is true of the old East is fast becoming true of the soil of the older settled portions of Wisconsin. To augment the productive capacity of a given number of acres, that will now support in semi-starvation a given number of cows, to a point in fertility that will add 2,000 pounds of milk per annum to each cow, milk worth, say $20, is to have the funds in hand to pay the sum of $400 as interest on the added value to an ordinary farm of eighty acres that is made to well keep twenty cows, instead of keeping them in the usual way. Four hundred dollars will pay 5 per cent interest per annum on an added value of $100 per acre to the farm. This can be done without adding a cow to the herd. All done by a simple expansion, through better use of the capital already in the hands of many who work on the semi-starvation plan.
The very first neglected opportunity of the mass of farmers is, that they do not see, and do not make much effort to see, that there is a better way than to plow, and plow, and plow, seldom seed down, keep a few head of spindling cows, mostly to give birth to spindling calves, that by a stretch of the imagination may be called cows when five or six years old; sell such cows, instead of selling butter and cheese to buy their clothes and groceries, sell hay to buy their whisky, and their farms by the bushel to pay for them if in debt, or to add some improvements in buildings if they are not. It would be useless to further describe them—they are not here, as they never go to dairy conventions, or even to county agricultural meetings or annual fairs; and so any rebuke of their methods would not reach their ears. Let them pass; the chief regret for their fate being that their name is legion, and that they seem to be beyond the reach of mercy.
The next class, and the one for which this association has much missionary work to do, is the one that has shown some signs of progress; that is still in unbelief of the radical truth, but yet seems to be uttering the invocation of doubting Thomas, of old. The most marked neglect of opportunity by this class is in not accepting the truth alluded to previously, that it pays to transform 2,500 and 3,000-pound cows into 4,000 and 5,000-pound ones, through the process of more generous, and better paying feeding. Many of this class know that a paying flow of milk comes only from food judiciously given; but who have not yet learned the programme by which such food can be ever on hand, or do not possess the intelligent enterprise to put forth the means to obtain it. As this is, largely, the hopeful class, we may well pray for their growth in dairy grace, in the knowledge of the truth, as it is exemplified in the reliable experience of the few saints in the business, who know how to make good common cows earn $50 and $60, and more, each, per annum.
Observation and my factory books for a series of years, teach that persons of this class start out well in the spring, and have cows that maintain the flowing stream for awhile, so that the four-and-five-thousand pound yield would be obtained if they did not suffer it to come to grief, by not providing means to hedge against the immediate and consequent influences of the first serious check in the supply of palatable and easily digested food in the pastures. This is the great fatality of the whole business—a tolerated calamity as we may call it, for it endures a lapse that can not afterward be made good, the same season. It is to the paying yield of the cow what an untimely frost is to an unmatured corn crop. It is my firm belief that this is the great sin of the medium good dairyman of this and other dairy States,—the cause of the low average earnings of the cows; the reason why so many dairymen work so cheaply; the promoter of infidelity in the mind of the dairyman as to whether he has not made a mistake in entering upon the dairy business at all; in short, it is the chief “neglected opportunity” to get upon the highway to success. That opportunity, when interpreted, means that when the chief available supply of food fails, or lessens, or becomes unpalatable or undigestible, that a substitute previously provided should be immediately supplied. Let the substitute be early rye, clover, oats, millet, corn, or other fodder, grown for the purpose, according to the time in the season in which the pressing need comes; and if neither are in available time, then let the substitute take the form of ground grain in larger measures than should be given to every cow in milk, every day, even when feeding on the flushest and choicest of grasses. That is the way the 5,000-pound to the cow dairymen do; and they win in doing it. But the blighted class seem to look upon it as they would on an accidental fire, an untimely death, an early frost, an unavertable calamity; a kind of Providential dispensation, the superstitious regard it. The latter class betake themselves to prayer for rain, instead of taking the scoop-shovel to the provender, and distributing it to their famishing herds. Troops of them don’t know that they are suffering any but present loss in weight, and delude themselves into thinking a blessed rain will restore their cows to the position they fell from. They don’t seem to comprehend that they thus lose their grip on the $50 and $60 per annum prize, and their uncertainty of getting it. The result is, they have their big flow of milk at the season of the year in which dairy products are ever the cheapest; and their cows are crippled for good performance at the pail, when ever-returning good prices in the fall and early winter show them what golden opportunities they have lost.
Now I can look over my list of patrons and see in my mind’s eye the men who practice both the systems I allude to. One is the discomforted, doubting dairyman with but too little to show for his hard work; and the other has a good bank account, or a plethoric purse, and his sharpest look is given in search of more good cows, whose owners don’t know any more than to sell them. There is not a whine about them, nor do they go into a decline because another half-cent could not be squeezed out of the cheese market. Their talk is, content with “well done,” and their cure for hard times is, “more milk.”
The most manifest loss, as it appears to one taking note of merely dollars and cents, in the prosecution of any special pursuit comes to light in the dairy business, from this the chief neglected opportunity of the dairymen to gain more wealth.
There are other neglected opportunities,—minor matters in themselves—that if improved would make the goal of the enterprising dairymen easier of attainment, and are, therefore, desirable adjuncts in accomplishing his purposes, and they seem to be concomitants of measurably high success. One is in not properly testing the real profit-earning capacity of each cow, and weeding out those that are not only not profitable but are actually, year after year, eating into the profits derived from other, and it may be not so good appearing cows. Profitable performance not only at the pail, but at the churn and the cheese-vat, should alone give a cow respite from coming, in her youth, to the butcher’s block.
Another, is that there is a woeful benightedness in providing stables suitable to milk in, and easy and healthful for the cows to live in, as they should be allowed to do for more than half of the hours of the year. The advanced dairymen who have plank floors daily littered, cleaned, and cleansed, drops in the floor, and clean walks in the rear of the cows, well-ventilated, but warm, non-freezing stables, would be amazed and disgusted to enter what I greatly fear are a majority of the stables of the State, in which the cows are thrust to endure a painful and filthy existence. When purity of product has a great influence in gauging the price, and the health of consumers is at stake, this neglect in providing better and more cleanly stabling is one of the crying ills of our dairy system. I am glad to know that the supervision of the health officials of Milwaukee extends to the stables of the cows that produce the milk that is allowed to be sold in that city. It would be well if it was made the imperative duty of the health officials of every town to forcibly establish the blessings of a decent civilization in the cow stables of more than half of the farmers of Wisconsin. I am moved to thus speak because of what I have seen—and smelled. I will not quarrel with a man who claims the unalienable right to rot, as a hermit, but I deny his right to freely make and sell to others, unwholesome food, into which he has mingled filth and the germs of disease and death. It is shameful to neglect to provide good and healthful stables for food-producing dairy stock—one that calls for vengeance on a criminality.
Another neglected opportunity of the dairymen to increase the number of head their farms might subsist, and thus increase their profits, especially those who occupy our highest priced lands, is in their declining to adopt the system of soiling. I do not know of a highly successful dairyman in the State who has not adopted it, in part, at least—enough to save his cows when famine is in sight. Neither do I believe there is one who would not be more successful if he should practice it more. The arrived-at goal of the select few who keep as many cows as they have acres of land, has been reached by and through the soiling process; and approximate successes like theirs must be achieved by traveling the same route. There are those who are ensmalling their pastures, and at the same time, increasing their herds, because the lands taken from the pasture and devoted to soiling crops produce more than the old herds can consume. The wandering cow feeds herself, in fact, from what might be the choicest product of her own milk, tramps the life out of much more, and tosses her head in disdain at much that if cut and properly fed in the stall, she would eat with a relish; so that it may be safely said that two, and some practical men say three, cows might be well-fed through soiling, on the same land that one is by the system of exclusive pasturing.
Another, it may well be called the lost opportunity—that grows out of the neglected ones alluded to, is that the cows are not kept in good milking condition more of the time of the year. The men who seize and utilize the few opportunities I have mentioned very soon learn that they have an almost perpetual fount of wealth; and that they can not afford to dry it up, and wait for spring. Putting in more time for the cow to produce, inevitably convinces them of the fact that the larger part of the cow’s earnings are made when dairy products are high in price; and they are dull, indeed, if they do not see in that a revelation that more winter dairying would pay. I am aware that the flippant answer made by those disinclined to adopt soiling and winter dairying, is, that they involve employment of more manual labor on a given number of acres, and that reliable farm labor is hard to get and troublesome to keep. This is the first superficial pretext of nine-tenths of those advanced enough to ever give these subjects a serious thought. Nevertheless, the practice of these innovations are essential in the higher grade of farming; and that practice, instead of being an ill, is a blessing to the farm, to the farmer, to his older children, and to the hired laborer; for it gives all of them steady and profitable employment, while the present system requires the far greater proportion of labor in the spring and summer months, and furnishes less to do in winter for the hired man and the grown-up boys and girls. They thus lounge, often, in debasing idleness, or are early weaned from the farm, and go away, never to return to partake of its real, invigorating life, its independence, and its joys. The dairy, with the accompaniment of soiling and more production of dairy products in the winter, would make the farm more like a factory, with every wheel in motion almost the entire year. The home and the family of the dairy farmer should be as large as the capacity of the man and the woman at the helm; and as steady employment as that which must be given to the store or shop would go a long way in developing and increasing the capacity of the whole force to manage more. Giving regular employment to good men on the farm makes it far easier to get and to keep them; and it retains a more brawny set of men, who are otherwise enticed to the factories and railways that give steady work, and so have the pick of the intelligent and most reliable ones. It is an accomplishment in a farmer and his wife to know how to get, and how to keep good, faithful hired men. I know of those who are slaves, because they don’t know how. Many of them ascribe it to the men, when they themselves are principally at fault. There is a mortal dread of “tramps,” especially among the more ignorant farmers. But I aver that the common system of almost exclusive grain farming that crowds most of the labor of the year into a few spring and summer months, is a direct cause of much of the tramp evil of which so many farmers complain. It manufactures the tramps who rove from necessity, and even drives out their own children to swell the ranks of those in search of a job. On the other hand, a large increase of milk-stock kept on the farm necessitates the retention of most of the manual force of the summer months. Not how to dispense with hired labor or the labor of his children, but how to profitably employ and elevate it, and make it inviting, rather than abhorrent and slavish, is the problem the progressive farmer should study to solve. The manufacturer counts upon additional gains through the addition of well-employed laborers. The farmer could do the same if he used more educated brains and a little less over-taxed muscle in his business. The bulk of every fortune steadily acquired, consists of the success of its possessor in getting, honestly or dishonestly, a profit from the labors of others. This must be so, so long as it is an axiom in political economy that labor is the basis of all wealth. The owner of the soil can succeed in winning more than a pro rata proportion, just in the ratio of his ability to make his brains help the work of his hands.
I know of whole sections, and even contiguous miles square, on which the system of farming prevails that I have condemned—the hired man is unknown, save only for short periods of the year—the children gone to the cities, to the factories, the railroads, or to the West—the land denuded of stock, almost, as well as of the rightful ones to care for it; and half-impoverished farms, half farmed by the old folks, or continuously cropped on shares by more indigent neighbors. Possessions that by nature are as fair as ever the sun shone upon, that do not, and can not now pay five per cent interest on $25 per acre; when well managed dairy farms in the same county pay more than that per cent on a basis of $100 per acre. In view of these patent facts that stare us in the face, is it any wonder that some of us feel we have a loud call to dispense the pure dairy gospel to these perishing sinners who thus neglect their grand opportunities.
In some one of the first sentences of this paper I alluded to the influence of good and profitable farming in improving the condition and standing of the farmer, as a man among men. This, after all, is the crowning objective point, or should be, of all those who make the most of the opportunities the great mass neglect. If with all his getting a man does not get some real wisdom, some development in stalwart morality, and a higher cultivation of the mind, it needs no Solomon or Bible to tell the on-lookers that he is a comparative failure; and it ought to be apparent to himself. The legitimate profits of a higher grade of farming ought to be expended to elevate the farmer, his wife, his children, and all the attendants whom he directs. Part of them should appear in the form of better and more comfortable houses and barns, finer stock, better horses, better roads and school-houses, a larger list of newspapers and periodicals, better libraries and better housekeeping, and more cheery houses in which intelligence and music are not strangers. It is as important that a man should spend his earnings aright, as that he should use his energies and talents to earn. It is not a manly element in a man whose chief forte is that he can hold all he can get. A clam can do that, and not suffer much, either, in a comparison of brains with the groveling getter of mere wealth. The high behest to earn much, by and through grand opportunities to labor and direct labor, blossoms into blessing in its best sense only when the earnings are spent to increase the intelligence, add to the comforts, and aid men to discharge their private and public duties more nobly than it is possible for a man to do with an income that simply gives him bread.
Because the earnings of the farm are not more frequently spent in thus installing a section of paradise on the farm, is the real cause of the stampede therefrom of many of the smart ones who deem the struggle for elevation there a hopeless one, and, catching an inspiration from the shriek of civilization that announces each swiftly flying train, they turn their backs on what have been to them farm dungeons, and mingle with the surging throng in quest of a better condition. That they are often mistaken and baffled in taking such a route, does not deter a new crowd from going. They fly from what they dread, as much as they are inspired by what they hope to win. These things ought not so to be; and a wise improvement of the many neglected opportunities on the farm would go far to rectify the ills they fly from, but from which yet few escape.
Say what we will about all its defects, its uninviting toil, and low wages, agriculture disenthralled of its ignorance is the basis rock of our hope; and he is a slanderer of the noblest occupation who raises the veil to expose its defects and servility for any other purpose than to help make greener its verdure, and brighten its bloom.
REMEMBER that $2.00 pays for The Prairie Farmer one year, and the subscriber gets a copy of The Prairie Farmer County Map of the United States, free! This is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country.
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