Dane County, Wisconsin - Chapter 4 (2 of 2 so headed), 1905

The Dairy Industry

As in most new countries, dairying in Wisconsin was slow in getting a start. The first American settlers almost invariably brought one or two cows with them and were thus more or less well supplied with milk and butter. The foreigners just as invariably brought no cows, and it was often some years before they were able to buy them. As a consequence butter was always scarce and usually dear throughout the first twenty years, unless it was for a few weeks during midsummer, when the weather would not permit the producer either to ship or hold it for a better market.

A glance at the prices paid®* makes it clear that a single pound of marketable butter was often worth more in Madison than a bushel of wheat, yet with a small investment in cows it was entirely possible to turn the produce of an acre into seventy-five pounds of butter instead of eight or ten bushels of wheat, and the cash outlay for maintaining the dairy after once it was started was not equal to the expense of raising wheat. In spite of these possibilities, and they were thoroughly tested,®^ butter and cheese were shipped from other states to Wisconsin even as late as i860, while for half or more of the farmers to buy butter, cheese, and even milk was so common as to excite no comment.®* The usual answer to the query, why was this so, is that farmers were too poor to. buy cows and build barns; they had no good place for making butter, and besides, butter could not well be shipped a thousand miles with the transportation facilities then available. Let us see : A cow was worth about twelve dollars in 1848 and hardly double that within ten years following. The plea that barns could not be provided was nonsense, yet some farmers argued that cows hardy enough to stand winter weather must be had before dairying would succeed. True there were not the best of opportunities for taking good care of butter during the hot weather, but cheese could be made instead, and that would stand shipping to the eastern market. During the cool part of the year butter could be handled without loss, and the cost of sending it from Milwaukee to New York was only about a cent a pound, that is from five to ten per cent, of its value, while wheat at a little less per pound for freight could not be carried to New York short of twenty to forty cents per bushel during a long period of years, and this was seldom less than a third of its value, sometimes indeed absorbing the whole.®'

Of the few farmers who did go into dairying during the wheat period there seems to be not a single adverse report given ; even v/ith indifferent management a dairy at that time was bound to succeed. Occasionally a man kept an account of his receipts from sales of butter and cheese,®* and though the amount produced was small these were the few farmers who were not in debt at the stores ; they were the only ones who believed that tame grass and clover would succeed. During the summer months cheese was made at home, for there were no factories, and where one family had not milk enough for a cheese of respectable size, several neighbors would "change milk," one making a cheese one day and another the next, out of the combined supply. This may be called the germ of cooperative cheese factories. In this primitive way a fifteen-dollar cow on four acres of land worth from two to ten dollars per acre could be made to produce from twenty to forty dollars per year ; not a bad percentage, even though the necessary labor, otherwise expended in futile efforts to raise wheat, had been reckoned at the outside figure.

but by 1870 the tide had turned, the census of that year showing the product of Dane county to be about a million and a quarter pounds of butter - ^a gain of 33 per cent, within a decade. There is no occasion to dwell upon the reasons for giving so much attention to dairying at that time : it was a mere turning from a dead industry to a live one, from a process which was fast sapping the soil of its remaining fertility to one which would slowly but surely replace the needed richness. From 1870 to 1880 prices were low and the increase in butter production was small.

With cheese a remarkable change had taken place. In 1870 the quantity of cheese was less than one twenty-eighth that of butter; in 1880 it was almost one-sixth. This gjain was due to two principal causes: first, the relative price of cheese was high, and second, the Swiss people from Green county spread over into Dane and engaged in cheese making, since which time cheese has steadily taken a more important place. During the '70's cheese factories were established in nearly every town; there were two in Bristol, two in Dane, one in York, one in Blue Mounds, etc. ; but by 1880, or soon after, the most of these were closed for want of patronage and the cheese and butter industries instead of running side by side in direct competition began to localize themselves with respect to physiographic areas. It may be shown that Wisconsin is a cheese-producing state because of climatic conditions; it may also be shown that social influences have resulted in localizing the industry, as in Green county, where the map is dotted with Swiss cheese factories; but neither nor both of these reasons can explain satisfactorily why there are thirtynine cheese factories in the "driftless" area in the southwest part of Dane county and a single one in all the remainder. True this section is near to Green county and the Swiss gradually spread to the north, or at least furnished cheese makers whenever there was a demand for them, but they were equally near neighbors to the southeastern part of the county where the single cheese factory is found. The explanation seems briefly to be this: There is more money in making cheese, especially Swiss or Limburger, than in butter. But on the other hand, the whey is worth almost nothing, while skimmed milk and butter-milk are excellent feed for pigs and calves. In the hilly districts corn cannot be raised in large quantities, hence it is useless to attempt raising large numbers of hogs. With these facts before him the farmer in the hilly region sees a larger profit in making cheese, and the farmer in the better com district refuses to patronize a .cheese factory at all, and sends his milk to a butter factory. That this is not a fanciful statement of the case may be seen in the following table made from the assessors' returns for 1894.

In these representative towns we find that in the dairy group there are not half as many hogs as cows ; in the other group there are forty per cent. more. In the dairy group there is a third as much corn as in the other, and the amount of butter is less than two-thirds that of the mixed farming group, while in the relative amounts of cheese made there is no comparison. The conclusion is that growing hogs and corn is, other things beifig equal, in the estimation of the farmer, the more profitable industry ; but where corn cannot advantageously be raised the number of hogs will be small, and milk not being needed for feed, cheese will crowd butter making out. This analysis would seem to hold good in explaining why Wisconsin is a cheese-making state and almost no cheese is made in Iowa, which ranks high in butter production; but allowance would also need to be made for the more favorable climate for cheese making in Wisconsin. And in general it would be necessary to take the three factors, climatic, social, economic, into consideration before making dogmatic statements

The profits of dairying are by no means small. The names can be furnished of men who have gone in debt for high-priced land and paid for it within a few years, getting almost the entire sum from the sale of butter or cheese. One dairy of thirty cows brought in twenty-four hundred dollars in the two years, 1899 and 1900. Others can be cited which have done equally well. The labor involved is of course a big item but here as in tobacco growing the labor is of a cheap kind and is nearly all done by the family. This is an important point. It has never been found profitable to hire much help on a dairy farm ; the main part of the work is milking and taking milk to the factory, which is done morning and evening, and the amount of general farming to be done on a dairy farm does not furnish employment for a large force of men. It is safe to say that the major part of this industry is carried on without any hired help at all. Dairying is in the hands of the men with large families - Norwegians, Germans, Irish, and to a less extent Americans. Hardly a dairy can be found, that is, a large one, managed by a man who must depend on doing all the work himself or hiring it done ; such a farmer prefers raising sheep, hogs, horses ; and once in a while a man whose interest has long been in dairying, finding himself left to do his own work, continues to raise cows, but sells them to his neighbors. There is little to be said against this custom of requiring children to do the work of the dairy ; the work is not excessively disagreeable; it is not severe or long continued; it does not interfere with their school work, or take them away from home, or lead to unwholesome surroundings or associations - ^almost every count of which must be given an opposite answer in regard to tobacco culture.

There are several reasons why dairying has gained so much importance during the past ten years. Instead of the former great fluctuation in the price of butter, it being down below cost of production in the summer and correspondingly high in winter, the price for the past decade has been remarkably uniform for the diflFerent months of the year. Winter dairying is common since the obstacles in its way have been overcome. Factory-made butter is of a higher grade than that made on the farm. And furthermore it is possible to put butter in cold storage and keep it 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 excellence 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 dairyman is still further discouraged by the system of state dairy and creamery inspection in vogue in almost all dairy sections. Expense 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 convenient 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 concerned, and it is still in progress. Moreover, dairying is self-sustaining; there is no constant nightmare of over-production, or fear that the addition of a new island to the flag, or the diange in the political complexion of congress will pauperize those dependent 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 Mississippi Valley. With the exception of a comparatively small number of dairies kept primarily for the sale of milk by the quart, they are all of a plain business-like sort. Little fancy stodk is kept, and little fancy or unusual feed used. The cows 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 com is fed in the fall as soon as it is well grown or as socm as the pasture begins to fail ; this fodder also constitutes one of the standard feeds for winter and is usually cured in the shock and fed in an open yard, though occasionally it is cut or shredded and fed in a manger. Clover and timothy constitute the principal hay, which, together with corn and oats, sometimes ground^ but as often whole, and possibly a few pumpkins or turnips, make up the ration.

Probably dairying has worked a greater change in the people engaged in it than has any other kind of agriculture in the state. During the wheat period it was customary for the German to get up early, harness his team, eat a light breakfast, and at six, or six-thirty o'clock, go to the field, where in a slow but steady and painstaking way he would plod along at his work, stop about ten for lunch of brown bread with ham or sausage and a few cups of coffee, take an hour or a little more for his dinner, repeat the program in the afternoon, reaching the house a little before dusk even in the longest days, and after taking the harness from his horses, and eating supper, go to bed; the "chores" were invariably left to his Frau. This routine in a little less methodical manner was carried out by other foreigners and even by many Americans, though the latter always worked fewer hours and at a brisker pace. These various nationalities have all gone into dairying, and their habits of work have undergone a transformation. They still must arise early in the morning but the first duty is to get the milk started to the factory and in this the boys and girls have a part. Breakfast comes at a later hour and by the time the teams are started to the field the sun is high. The leisurely manner of the farmer of a generation ago will not do now, and with a fast-moving team, with little lingering at the ends of the field, with the lunches omitted, the Germans as well as the rest have adopted the genuine American hustle.

Dairying is here to stay. If it does not offer as many possibilities for sudden wealth as does tobacco, it is less of a lottery, and has fewer failures charged to its account. It will go on making the soil richer for an indefinite number of years. It is to the ameliorating effects of dairying that tobacco farming owes its success and permanence, and it is fast coming into favor as a supplement to that industry.^*^ It is, however, the opinion of both dairymen and real-estate dealers, that the price of land in some parts of the county has gone beyond the point where it will be a profitable investment for dairy purposes. To make any net gain at dairying on land at a hundred dollars an acre, with interest at five per cent., requires keener business ability than most farmers possess; and these conditions are likely to continue while there are such limitless possibilities for dairying to spread over northern Wisconsin and other similar districts.