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Hibbard, Benjamin Horace, 1870-1955 / The history of agriculture in Dane County, Wisconsin
(1904)
Chapter IV: The dairy industry, pp. 176-184
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Page 181
III HIBBARD-HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE IN DANE COUNTY. 181 several months without any perceptible change in quality, and the improved equipments in transportation enable it to go to the best market however distant. The whole general average of excel- lence in dairy cows has been materially raised by processes which make it easy to pay for milk according to the butter it will make, as with the "Babcock Test," and the inefficient and untidy dairy- man is still further discouraged by the system of state dairy and creamery inspection in vogue in almost all dairy sections. Ex- pense of manufacture has been, and is still being, greatly reduced by the concentration of the business. The good results to be gained by the system of establishing skimming stations at con- venient intervals over the country or by using hand separators, and shipping the cream to some common center where it can be handled by experts and made into gilt-edge butter at the lowest possible cost, is a problem not fully worked out. But there has certainly been an "industrial revolution" so far as dairying is con- cerned, and it is still in progress. Moreover, dairying is self-sus- taining; there is no constant nightmare of over-production, or fear that the addition of a new island to the flag, or the change in the political complexion of congress will pauperize those depend- ent on its prosperity. To the anxiety of tobacco growers over tariff, and frost, and hail, and drought, the dairyman is almost a stranger. As to the details of managing a dairy farm little need be said to anyone familiar with dairying in any part of the upper Missis- sippi Valley. With the exception of a comparatively small num- ber of dairies kept primarily for the sale of milk by the quart, they are all of a plain business-like sort. Little fancy stock is kept, and little fancy or unusual feed used. The cowvs are a motley lot in color and breed, there seldom being a herd showing much uniformity. In the mixed farming sections the Shorthorns are the most common; in the dairy sections there are more Jerseys, Holsteins, Guernseys. and what not, each cow being chosen for individual excellence, primarily for dairy purposes, yet with the secondary object of producing a fair amount of beef; as to the ratio in which these qualities should be combined there are about as many opinions as farmers. The feed of the dairy cow is grass in summer; no soiling is practiced, though a very small feed of meal is sometimes given at milking time. Almost invariably green corn is fed in the fall as soon as it is well grown or as soon
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