DAIRYING. 



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$140 worth of butter; and when she dies we can afford to bury 

 her, and, perhaps, to put up a monument over her remains. She 

 will have paid her way even though nothing be realized for her 

 carcass. It is better to grow a special purpose animal, one bred 

 for one particular thing and doing that one thing particularly 

 well, than to attempt to produce milk and beef from the same 

 animal. Gov. Hoard illustrates this notion well when he asks 

 what dairyman there is who ever dreams of hunting for foxes 

 with a bird dog, or for birds with a fox hound, or for either with 

 a bulldog. The bird dog was built for one specific thing, the 

 fox hound for another and the bulldog for a third. Yet the 

 man who believes in special breeding as applied to dogs all too 

 frequently goes hunting for butter with a beef animal. 



II. THE FUEL — THE FOOD. 



We must now pass to the consideration of the food which is 

 the fuel which produces the force, the energy in our cow machine. 

 The locomotive is driven by the burning of coal in the fire box, 

 its combustion producing heat, which changes water into steam, 

 which, passing into the cylinder, moves the piston rod. Thus 

 heat, one form of energy, is transformed into motion, another 

 form of energy. Food contains much energy, which enter- 

 ing into the cow's being is in part made into or stored in 

 milk. The many things fed cows — hay, silage, roots, soiling 

 crops, cottonseed meal and the like, are simply nature's com- 

 binations or man's reworkings of three or four nutrients. We 

 need concern ourselves today with but two, those forming flesh 

 and those producing heat, the protein and the carbohydrates, as 

 the chemist calls them. 



We have heard a good deal of late years of what is known as 

 the balanced ration, that is to say, that ration, if there be such, 

 which contains the correct proportions of the flesh and milk 

 making nutrients and the heat producing nutrients. It is a moot 

 point what are the best proportions. I do not, myself, credit the 

 notion that there is any one, fixed, absolute, standard, balanced 

 ration to which cow feeding should be adjusted. The balanced 

 ration as it is understood today is a fluctuating thing, varying 

 according to altering conditions, a matter into which judgment 

 must enter to a very large extent. Physiological chemists lay 

 down rules and formulate recipes calculated to produce maximum 

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