The Iowa plain dealer. [volume] (New Oregon, Howard County, Iowa) 1867-1895, 1891-06-11
PROFIT IN RAISING COWS.

Importance Of Having stock That Can be
Depended Upon.
A good many dairymen, especially
those living near large cities, think it
will not pay them to raise their own
cows. preferring to buy fresh cows,
milk them SO long ms they yield profit,
then sell and replace with others.
Where man Is q very good Judge Of
cows. and has good market in which
to purchase, this may be made q paying
business, but II the cost of raising a cow
till two years-at which age she ought to
become worker-and the better quality
of the home-raised cow were to be off
set by the difference between the SELL
ing price Of the dry cow and the pur-
chase price of the fresh one, l believe
the result would show in favor of the
home-raised cow. Particularly would
this be true II the cows were sired by a
first-class dairy bull, and no other should
| be used.
Some object to growing their own
cows because they cannot afford to feed
the calves with milk; this objection
doesn't apply in the butter dairy, be.
cause there is always plenty Of skinned
milk. but in q dairy where whole milk
is sold the case is little different, but
even here the objection is not serious
one, for the calves can be fed after the
first week upon artificial milk made
from middlings, oat meal and linseed
meal, together with hay tea. II were
selling milk certainly should raise my
own cows, for then / would know what
had to depend upon Tor pretty near it,
when one of my heifers dropped her
calf; but II l were to buy cows I would
not know very much about them until I
had MIXED them for months. l have
noticed that those dairymen who buy
COWS are changing their herds oftcncr
than l should imagine would be neces-
sary merely to replace dry cows with
fresh ones: there are a good many that
they only milk for a month or two And
the kind of cows they are sometimes
compelled to buy, or 60 without, are
such scarecrows that 1 would not like
to have them on my farm. Besides all
this is the comfort of having good dis
POSTPONED, well-trained cows that you
have raised and know that when You
milk them you will not have to specu-
late upon how much milk you will lose
by the cows kicking over the pail.
One thing would not do would be to
sell milk by the pound to the creamery
without regard to how much butter fat
the pound had in it. don't see why
dairymen will consent to pool their milk
and take pay for it by its weight alone,
knowing rs they must that there is such
a wide variation in the quality of the
milk sent by different patrons ! sup
pose it is often the case that few of
the patrons who feed we'll and keep
good cows are really the life of the
creamery. Without them the rest of the
patrons iii the creamery were CO.
operative one) would retire from the
business in disgust. Now in this sup
posed case a few men are supporting
their neighbors. and l for one am not
SO charitably inclined as all that comes
to. II my neighbor cannot support him
self, will do my share towards keep
ing him, but prefer to do it in . less
compulsory and wholesale way than by
putting my rich milk with his poor milk
and then dividing the profits equally
Passover, in National Stockman.