42 agriculture; of maine. 



occur to you that after all that is said about a herd of cows, that 

 herd has still a minor position in our business of farming? Did 

 it ever occur to you that all in the world that your herd of cows 

 does for you is simply to constitute the vehicle for taking the 

 products of your farm to market? The cow simply takes the 

 rough, coarse products of your farm, difficult of transportation, 

 not finding a ready market, and transposes that product into 

 another product more easily transported, finding an easier and 

 better market, and so bringing the results home to your pocket- 

 book in a quicker and more satisfactory manner than could be 

 done in any other way. That is all the herd of cows is to you. 

 Then is it not of importance to have your farm in a productive 

 condition as well as the herd ? 



I will ask you to follow the line of Dr. Smead's thought. ' He 

 said, you will remember, that you could feed your animals a 

 starvation ration, and thereby ruin their constitutions and bring 

 on future trouble ; or you could accomplish the same result by 

 overfeeding. I want to say that the same causes will produce 

 trouble from an economical standpoint, just as they do from a 

 standpoint of health. You can feed your cows away below the 

 point of profit, and it is also possible, though not so common, to 

 feed them above the point of profit. Every cow must have, to 

 begin with, a ration sufficient for her maintenance. Before she 

 puts milk into the pail she must have a sufficient amount of food 

 to support life and maintain her body. Of course I know, as 

 you all do, that when fresh a cow will, for a time, take from her 

 own body, her own flesh, to make milk, but that is only a tempo- 

 rary, and, if long continued, a very expensive thing for the 

 farmer. Your profit must come out of the surplus that you feed 

 to the cow over and above what she needs to maintain herself, 

 and unless you do feed above that point, the result is simply a 

 loss of what she has consumed. Take the little colt that the 

 doctor spoke of, that went into the barn in the fall a horse, ears 

 erect, eyes bright, a proper conformation, and came out in the 

 spring as he so accurately described him, — a sun-fish. Assume 

 for a moment that that course of treatment had no permanent 

 effect on the health of the colt, would it still follow that that had 

 been a profitable and wise method of procedure ? Don't you see 

 that the colt in the spring was not so far along towards being a 

 horse as he was in the fall? What does that mean? Simply 



