The 600,000 U. S. dairy farms carry on an industry whose annual output is almost equal in value to that of petroleum and runs automobiles a close race. Its gross revenue of a billion and a half dollars exceeds that for all grains and vegetables combined, accounts for more than a quarter of total U. S. farm income. Its $7,000,000,000 worth of land, buildings and herds make it the No. 1 cash venture in agriculture. For cooking, drinking, canning, butter, cheese its 26,000,000 cows yield a hundred billion pounds of milk every year. Into the midst of this great industry last week was tossed a book called Breeding Profitable Dairy Cattle* which contained the astounding charge that most U. S. milk is eked from almost medieval cattle bred by almost medieval methods, despite the fact that a much better method is available and much better grades of cattle in sight.
Breeding Profitable Dairy Cattle is not a modest book; it was not written by a modest man. Backed by an imposing array of hard fact, cold logic and concrete results, it is intended to give conquering impetus to a great campaign. Its avowed purpose is nothing less than "to do for animal husbandry in the 20th Century as much as was done for crop farming in the 19th Century by the invention of agricultural machinery." It was written by a rich, disputatious, immensely learned old gentleman named E. (for Ezra) Parmelee Prentice, who is a son-in-law of John Davison Rockefeller.
Breeder Prentice bought his first bull two decades ago. A handsome, impeccably pedigreed creature, it cost Breeder Prentice $10,000 and turned out to be sterile. That was probably the first come-uppance smart Mr. Prentice ever had. He was born 71 years ago, scion of an old Albany family in which pedigreed cattle had long been a hobby. He sped through Amherst and Harvard Law School, went to Chicago, got a reputation as one of the city's ablest and coldest young men, made friends with Cyrus McCormick, became general counsel for Illinois Steel. At the turn of the Century, he moved to Manhattan and married Alta Rockefeller whose fortune was estimated at $50,000,000. Active law practice held him not many years after that. In 1911 he bought 1,000 acres in the Berkshires near Williamstown, Mass., called the place Mount Hope, has spent much of his time there ever since. He became a world authority on potato growing, experimented with corn from South America, bees, poultry, finally and most importantly with cattle. Able to converse fluently in Latin, he made his three children learn to speak it, and visitors occasionally heard the tots deliver bulletins on the day's egg output in the sonorous language of Cicero. Today there are 1,500 acres around the 220-ft.-long house at Mount Hope and the tax assessment is one of the two highest in Massachusetts. Placid, meticulous Mrs. Prentice has a great pipe organ, gives elaborate musicales. A corps of geneticists and laboratory workers is constantly in residence, juggling the genes and chromosomes of 10,000 mice. Friends and admirers say that Mr. Prentice's unique achievement could never have come about had he not been rich enough to finance it, inquisitive and learned enough to direct it himself.