Daughters could attend summer ag courses including "lectures on home dairying, instruction and practical work in the manufacture of cheese especially adapted to home dairying in caring for milk and making it into butter after the most approved methods, and in testing cream and milk." Agriculture schools encouraged farm children to leave home for college while it bound them to the farm through newly acquired knowledge.

The "Father of Cooperatives"

Theophilus L. Haecker came to Minnesota from Wisconsin in 1891 to start a school of dairying at the University of Minnesota College of Agriculture. Haecker believed that if farmers owned their own creameries together, they would be motivated to apply better methods in general operation of their dairying. On behalf of the University of Minnesota Ag School, Haecker traveled through Minnesota, expounding the virtues of cooperatives. By 1898 the state had 560 cooperative creameries and Haecker had come to be known as the "Father of Cooperatives," as well as the "Father of Dairying in Minnesota." But creameries had their government problems too: Antitrust laws prevented groups of creameries from marketing produce together for railroad carlot rates, and until the federal government intervened, larger corporations controlled the prices paid to farmers.

The Federal Government and World War I

In World War I, the federal government made its first direct involvement in dairy farming by encouraging increased farm production. Dairy prices also rose with wartime demands at home and abroad. Stearns County farmers responded by expanding dairy herds and switching to winter dairying, producing more milk than ever before. By 1920 there were 42,543 dairy cows in Stearns County, fifty-seven to each square mile.

Legislation between the Wars

After the war ended in 1918, prices dropped with demand, and agriculture leaders tried to unite cooperatives and other associations in support of a national farm policy. In 1922 a United States senator from Minnesota, Andrew Volstead, authored the Capper-Volstead Act, enabling farmers to jointly market their products without being prosecuted for antitrust violation. This allowed farmers