THE MISSING LINK IX OUR STOCK HUSBANDRY. 8 1 



selling it off the farm, feeding a little to the horses. If you have 

 any manure about the place put it on the young clover during 

 the fall or av inter, and the next season you will cut a good crop 

 of hay, and if the season is favorable you will have a good crop 

 of aftermath, \vhich you can turn under for the potato crop the 

 following year. Then you have a large amount of vegetable 

 matter in the soil, which is just what you need. I believe this 

 soil is ver}' fertile, containing potash and phosphoric acid in 

 great quantities if v/e cultivate it to make those elements avail- 

 able, but we are slowly but surely taking out the vegetable mat- 

 ter, the humus. This humus can be replaced by the clover plant, 

 from the roots and the stalks and the leaves, and the clover has 

 another valuable quality in that it is able to get nitrogen from the 

 air. Your bill for commercial fertilizers can be cut in two, and 

 cut in two again, by that process. 



Now, how will you feed that clover and grain ? To special 

 dairy cows, or to cows and dry stock ? The proposition in 

 regard to the special dairy cow looks to me something like this : 

 You can keep, say, 36 head profitably on your farm, to eat up the 

 grain and hay and the other rough fodder that you may have. 

 If you are keeping dairy cows, you will keep 30 of them in 

 milk, the others being young stock coming up to replace the cows 

 that vou mav sell. If those are well selected cows and vou are 

 forcing them, you will get a return of $80 every year from each 

 cow. It takes a pretty good cow to do this, but it is a fair return. 

 That means $2,400 from your herd. But it also means forcing 

 those cows twelve months in the year, milking them twice a day. 

 It means labor, it means skilled labor. It takes a man who likes 

 to do that kind of work in order to make a thorough success of 

 it. You cannot run those cows over a rough pasture ; you can- 

 not feed them a great deal of your coarse feeds without adding 

 concentrated feeds ; you cannot feed them heavily on roots, espe- 

 cially on turnips. But you are getting $2,400 dollars a year in 

 clean cash, not a bad income to supplement your potato crop, and 

 at the same time help in keeping up the fertility of the land. 



On the other hand, suppose you are keeping grade Short- 

 horns, using a Shorthorn male and getting large, strong cows, 

 with good constitutions. These cows properly handled, per- 

 haps not forced as high as the others, will turn you in $48 or $50 

 per year each for their products. I can point to two Shorthorn 



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