“A cow gives her poorest milk when she becomes fresh for the first time, and if properly cared for her milk will increase both in quality and quantity every succeeding period of lactation until she reaches her limit, or until she begins to decline on account of old age. A sudden change from very poor to very good pasturage will often cause, for the first few days, a feverish condition and an abnormal condition of the milk which may be a shrinkage of both milk and butter fat contents at the same time. Any sudden change from normal to abnormal conditions affects the amount and quality of the butter fat more than it does any or all the other solids in milk. A sudden chill, exposure to excessive heat without shade; no water one day and an abundance the next; milking at 4 o’clock in the morning and 9 o’clock at night one day, the reverse the next; no salt for a week, then a bucket full at once; all these extremes, seemingly exaggerated, are conditions which, I have observed, do exist, and methods which are practiced, more or less, on nearly all newly established dairy farms with many additions which might be truthfully enumerated in regard to care and feeding, or the lack of it, in winter especially.”