CHAPTER IX.
DAIRY-FARMING IN CALIFORNIA.
The great valleys of California do not produce much butter, and probably never will, though I am told that cows fed on alfalfa, which is a kind of lucerne, yield abundant and rich milk, and, when small and careful farming comes into fashion in this State, there is no reason why stall-fed cows should not yield butter, even in the San Joaquin or Sacramento valleys.
Indeed, with irrigation and stall-feeding, as one may have abundance of green food all the year round in the valleys, there should be excellent opportunity for butter-making.
But it is not necessary to use the agricultural soil for dairy purposes.
In the foot-hills of the Sierras, and on the mountains, too, for a distance of more than a hundred miles along and near the line of the railroad, there is a great deal of country admirably fitted for dairying, and where already some of the most prosperous butter ranchos, as they call them here, are found.

And as they are near a considerable population of miners and lumber-men, and have access by railroad to other centres of population, both eastward and westward, the business is prosperous in this large district, where, by moving higher up into the mountains as summer advances, the dairy-man secures green food for his cows the summer through, without trouble, on the one condition that he knows the country and how to pick out his land to advantage.
Another dairy district lies on the coast, where the fogs brought in by the prevailing north-west winds keep the ground moist, foster the greenness and succulence of the native grasses during the summer, at least in the ravines, and keep the springs alive.
Marin County, lying north of San Francisco, is the country of butter ranches on the coast, though there are also many profitable dairies south of the bay, in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties.

In fact, dry as California is commonly and erroneously supposed to be, it exports a considerable quantity of butter, and a dairy-man said to me but recently that, to make the business really prosperous, the State needed a million or two more inhabitants, which means that the surplus product is now so great that it keeps down the price.

No small quantity of this surplus goes East, as far as New York; and it is one of the curiosities of production and commerce that, while California can send butter to the Atlantic, it buys eggs of Illinois.

One would have thought the reverse more probable.
Marin County offers some important advantages to the dairy-farmer.