In my time and in the time that I have heard about, I don’t believe there has ever been a time when there was as much opportunity available to the Jersey breed as there is right now. I think we have the opportunity to do something that we’ve talked about for a long time and that is to expand the breed. I think the time is here.

We have an organization that, in my mind, is completely different from the kind of American Jersey Cattle Club we had in the ‘20s or the ‘30s or ‘40s, but one that is the finest sort of instrument to deal with the present day facts of life. We are doing a lot of things that we never dreamed that we would be doing. We have people who are highly skilled and capable of doing many different jobs like marketing milk and marketing Jerseys through the Jersey Marketing Service.

The thing that I want to ask each one of you, and this is an old subject with me, is to get involved. The American Jersey Cattle Club, as fine as it is, and National All-Jersey, as fine as it is, can do just very little real promotion of the breed. The most effective promotion is what my neighbor sees and what your neighbor sees when he looks over the fence at your farm. If you are doing a good job with your herd of cows and if you are giving them the kind of management that gets the kind of production that he wants and the kind of profit that he would like to have, you have his attention with your Jersey cows.

If we take positive attitudes toward the Club’s programs; positive attitudes toward testing, registration, classification and advertising, we are influencing others in the most effective way. There are a lot more of us than there are of the staff of The American Jersey Cattle Club and National All-Jersey Inc. We have the advantage in that our neighbor doesn’t realize that we are trying to influence him.

So, I want to say to each one of you, maybe I won’t get to see you again for another year, but I want all of you to do the same thing that my brothers tell me to do every now and then: