Seas of Milk.
Reading edition
A newspaper correspondent contributes the following which is of course made up of a mixture of facts and guesses. But as it is somewhere near the truth, as a general thing, we do as all the rest of the papers are doing, print it.
"There are nearly $2,000,250,000 invested in the dairying business in this country," said an officer of the Erie Milk Producers' Association yesterday. "That amount is almost double the money invested in banking and commercial industries, it is estimated that it requires 15,000,000 cows to supply the demand for milk and its products in the United States. To feed these cows 60,000,000 acres of land are under cultivation. The agricultural and dairy machinery and implements in use are worth over $200,000,000. The men employed in the business number 700,000 and the horses nearly 1,000,000. The cows and horses consume annually 30,000,000 tons of hay, nearly 90,000,000 bushels of corn meal, about the same amount of oat-meal, 275,000,000 bushels of oats, 2,000,000 bushels of bran, and 30,000,000 bushels of corn, to say nothing of the brewery grains and questionable feed of various kinds that is used to a great extent. It costs $400,000,000 to feed these cows and horses. The average price paid to the laborers necessary in the dairy business is probably $20 a month, amounting to $168,000,000 a year.
"The average cow yields about 450 gallons of milk a year, giving a total product of 6,750,000,000 gallons. Twelve cents a gallon is a fair price to estimate the value of this milk at, a total return to the dairy farmer of $810,000,000. Fifty per cent of the milk is made into cheese and butter. It takes twenty-seven pounds of milk to make one pound of butter, and about ten pounds of milk to make one pound of cheese. There is the same amount of nutrition in three and one half pounds of milk that there is in one pound of beef. A fat steer furnishes fifty per cent of boneless beef, but it would require about 24,000,000 steers, weighing 1,500 pounds each, to produce the same amount of nutrition as the annual milk product does."
