Florida Agricultural Experiment Station


not mean the State needs a greater number of large dairies, but
that more milk cows should be kept on the small farms.
 At present there are about 1,700,000 acres of land under culti-
vation in Florida, making a ratio of one dairy cow to every
forty acres of cultivated land. To supply the demand for dairy
products there should be from three to four good cows for every
forty acres under cultivation. It is not necessary that every
farmer be a dairyman, but every farmer should produce enough
milk and butter on the farm for home consumption thruout the
year. At present it is doubtful whether half the rural homes in
the State are thus supplied with either milk or butter.

 FACTORS INFLUENCING THE COST OF MILK PRODUCTION
 Three factors determine the cost of producing milk: (1) The
amount of milk produced by each cow in the herd, (2) the cost
and quantity of feed consumed by each cow, and (3) the labor
cost of feeding, milking and caring for the herd. With this in-
formation available the dairyman may determine whether he is
producing milk at a profit or at a loss. Without this informa-
tion he can only guess at the economy of operation. With this
data at hand the dairyman can determine, whether each cow is
giving a flow of milk large enough to be profitable, whether the
feed given is producing the results it should, and can check up
his labor account to determine the efficiency of his employes.
 The individual cow is the foundation of the successful dairy.
The dairy is a factory and, like all factories, the larger the out-
put the lower the relative cost of production. In dairying it is
not the milking of so many cows that governs the cost of pro-
duction, but how many gallons of milk each cow in the herd puts
into the pail twice each day for at least three hundred days of
the year. In this regard, there is a great difference in cows.
Cows are cows, but not all cows will produce milk three hun-
dred days of the year. This statement applies to all breeds of
dairy cattle. There is only one infallible way to determine
whether a cow is returning a profit and that is from knowing
exactly the amount of milk she produced during the year, and
the cost of that production.
 There are several ways of figuring the annual milk production
of a dairy cow. Some dairymen weigh or measure the milk for
two or three successive days about a month after the cow
freshens. If the cow happens to give four or five gallons of milk
a day while on test she is called a four- or five-gallon cow. The