INTRODUCTION
In writing this booklet I hope to put into it information valuable to the average farmer who keeps cows. I make no claim for this little book as an addition to dairy science. It is rather a subtraction. I mean that I have been careful to include only the most essential information. Where a great mass of scientific data is gathered, it takes discrimination to distinguish between matters of great and less importance. To do this discriminating and to point out the most essential things, as I see them, is the purpose of this undertaking.
Those who wish more detailed information can easily find it prepared by those who have studied this matter in detail. I have not. In my experience in the dairy business I have tried to use to the best and most practical advantage the scientific knowledge that I could acquire from others. My experience has all been an effort to apply science to business. It has been a business experience, not one of research and investigation. There is much that I have found to be of no particular use to me, but there are many things that I have found to be of great importance.
Science digs out facts, figures, data, knowledge, or whatever it may be called. To take facts of science and make use of them in business is one thing which Webster’s dictionary calls an art. This booklet, then, may not be classed as science for the writer is not so very scientific; it is not in itself a work of art for the writer is not strong on artistic ability; but is written on the art of keeping cows and paying the feed bills.
Stock and Stalks
CHAPTER I
INTENSIVE VERSUS BY-PRODUCT DAIRYING
Agriculture as a science is comparatively new. It is not like civil engineering, for instance, which is taught about alike in all places, and much of it the same as was taught a generation ago. Since I can remember most of what is now known about dairy science has been discovered. It is not surprising, therefore, that as the various ideas and doctrines come out they have both adherents and opponents. It takes time to clarify a situation and to prove what is the right conclusion. Some blame our agricultural colleges for not knowing more and knowing it sooner, and for spreading what we now know to have been in some cases misinformation. But the course taken was really the only one possible. Experiment stations have to try out a lot of theories in order to find which are wrong and which are right. At present there are many things still unknown and much difference of opinion. If the discussion which follows seems to differ in some respects with recognized authorities, I still think that I may be right; and if wrong, I claim as good a right as any one else to make mistakes.
Here are some things to think about. At one time there were more real dairy cattle in Lancaster county than there are at present. There were fairly large herds of grade Holsteins producing milk where now there are scarcely any cattle at all. Intensive dairying at one time had a fine start in Lancaster county, but now there is not a herd large enough to be called a dairy, except those owned by purebred breeders. The city milk supply comes from a large number of farmers who produce milk as a side issue. The methods of feeding and caring for cattle on these farms is in the main contrary to the instructions given by the dairy department at the State Farm. The men who made dairying a business here were learning and following agricultural college methods. They had good grade dairy cattle and produced fully twice as much per cow as do the farmers now in the business. They all quit because it did not pay.
It so happens that I was one of the men thus engaged. I had a fine herd of fifty high-grade Holsteins that were producing as much milk as is now being produced by thirty of our average dairy farmers. My herd was sold after losing money for two years. We were in a cow-testing association at the time and the fine records made by these cows helped to sell them at a public sale. Right in sight of the agricultural college all that had been accomplished seemed to fade away, and the old red cow, which dairy science has tried for a generation to kill, came back to the very skirts of the city. Just now if every dairy cow in Nebraska would be slaughtered, their milk would hardly be missed but if the old red cow would go on a strike, not a wheel in any creamery of the state would be turning next week.