So I say again to the farm boy and girl--if you want to do a big thing for your home place and for the neighbourhood, reform the dairy herd. Keep a record for every cow. Weigh the milk of each one separately every day for a week, then again two months later, and so on through her milking days. Take an average of all these weights as the weekly weight of milk and multiply by the number of weeks the cow gave milk. This will give the total number of pounds produced. Learn how to test for butter fat. Your neighbourhood creamery tests the milk with a Babcock test and you can learn how. Persuade your father to sell all the cows which fall below a fair standard and buy good ones. Test the milk of the cows he thinks of buying. A poor cow often looks as well as a good one. The Illinois Experiment Station shows by tests that twenty-five of the best cows in the state produce as much butter fat as ten hundred and twenty-one of the poorest cows, while eating only one fortieth as much food, to say nothing of the stable room, the time spent in milking, etc. And a quarter of the million cows in the state of Illinois are making their owners only seventy-seven cents a year apiece. Can your father afford to keep that kind of a cow? CLEAN HOME MILK I know what milking is on the farm. Take it on a frosty October morning about sun-up, when you make the cow get up from her bed so that you can stand in the "warm spot" to warm your feet. It gets no better from that time on, even if you do milk in the cow stable. But the boys that do the milking do not realize how perfectly filthy the milk often is when it gets to the house. Take a milk pail from the shelf, go down to the cow barn. There is the cow. Throw her down an armful of hay to chew on while you milk, brush off the stool, rub off the cow's bag with a wisp of hay if she is especially dirty, never mind your hands or the open pail, throw a stream of milk onto each palm and begin. Is there a little hay and dust in the pail? Never mind; it will strain out. When you get through, set the pail down while you drive the cows out to pasture. To be sure, they will raise a lot of cow-stable dust and the smell is pretty bad in there, but if you set it outside the pigs would get into it. It is nearly school time and you have other chores to do. Take it to the house and strain it. Mother always doubles the strainer cloth, but it takes an awful time for it to run through that way. There, you said the dirt would strain out, and look at it there in the cloth! This is a cold-hearted picture of one of the chores the farm boy particularly hates. Compare each item with your own methods and improve on each. Home milk is not always clean milk. [Illustration: Sanitary milk pail]