fe:eding dairy cows. 41 



feed and care upon the dairy cow. In order to do this they 

 turned aside from all highly bred, highly developed dairy animals 

 and went out amongst the farmers of the state and bought a herd 

 of about twenty cows, without attempting to select the cows of 

 the highest dairy type. These cows were mostly grade Short- 

 horns. They put them into the barn at the station, cared for 

 them properly and fed them properly, and the first year of that 

 treatment those cows averaged over 300 pounds of butter per 

 cow. It was not breed, they were not dairy cows ; it was simply 

 feed and care. Now if there is this difference, and there most 

 certainly is, is it not w^orth the while of every farmer engaged in 

 dairying, I care not whether he has two cows or one hundred, to 

 consider whether he cannot with satisfaction and profit produce 

 approximately these ideal conditions all through the year, so that 

 the cow may be kept up to her highest performance for nine, ten 

 or eleven months of the year, instead of falling dovvu, as she is 

 frequently allowed to do, to an amount of performance away 

 below the range of profit? 



This question of feeding is important, as I have said, and 

 further than that, it is difticult. You have all observed, I think, 

 how a child in school, and the teacher too for that matter, will 

 move along very easily through the simple matters of addition, 

 subtraction, multiplication and division, but by and by they get 

 over into the subjects of ratio and proportion and in almost every 

 case the child goes to pieces and quite often the teacher too. 

 Why is this ? Because they have a different sort of a problem, a 

 problem of relationship. We have a problem of the same char- 

 acter in this matter of feeding. It would be a comparatively 

 easy thing for the experiment station to give any intelligent 

 farmer a ration on which he could feed his dairy cows which 

 would enable those cows to produce satisfactory amounts of milk 

 and butter, but that is not all. That milk and butter must be 

 produced not only in satisfactory quantities but at a profit. That 

 brings in another element of the problem, it brings in the farm. 

 We have now to deal with the relationship between the farm and 

 the herd. The cows must not only produce in satisfactory quan- 

 tities, but the farm also must produce in such a way that when 

 the product is fed to those cows, supplemented it may be more 

 or less from the market, but still depending first of all upon the 

 farm, the resultant product shall be made at a profit. Did it ever 



