VERMONT DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 93 



have tried almost everything upon our farm in the line of forage 

 feeding when our pastures are dry, and, by the way, I believe our 

 Vermont pastures are one of the things that need our attention. Any 

 one by riding about the State can see too many of them growing up to 

 weeds so that they are producing less and less feed annually. 



I believe the way to take care of our pastures is to put stock enough 

 into them to eat all the feed and then supplement it with something else. 

 The first speaker said that in the hen idleness breeds discontent; that 

 is not so with the dairy cow. We do not want our dairy animals chasing 

 all over the hillsides trying to get something to eat when the pastures 

 are dry, and they cannot get enough to eat. We have got to supplement 

 our pasturage with something or we shall not get the profit out or our 

 dairy we ought to have. The best thing we ever had to feed on our 

 farm was good corn ensilage raised the season previous. We did not 

 have it last year because we did not have good ensilage the year pre- 

 vious. We have had a silo for over twenty years, and the last two 

 seasons have been the poorest seasons we ever had. 



This last season, I think, has been the hardest season we have 

 ever had on our farm to raise crops; the frost did us more harm than 

 the drouth. We live in the valley; the 8th of June we had a frost that 

 was hard enough so some standing water made ice nearly half an inch 

 thick. The 5th of September we had a frost that killed our corn. The 

 pastures that we have in Vermont, as I said, are an entirely different 

 problem from some they have in the regions where these gentlemen 

 come from. It was my fortune last summer to drive through the 

 States of the Middle West — Kansas, Iowa and Illinois — and when I 

 saw the luxuriant feed there was in the pastures, when I got back into 

 Illinois the latter or about the middle part of September and went 

 out into some of their corn fields out beyond Chicago and then came 

 back into Vermont and found the 5th of August my corn was frozen, 

 I wanted to turn around and go back again. We have got different 

 oroblems here to solve than they have there. 



For the past few years we have had a good deal of green clover 

 through the latter part of the season to supplement the pastures. I do 

 not like to feed green corn until it is pretty well matured, for the 

 reason I can water my cattle at the brook cheaper. I believe it is worth 

 more to let it grow and come to maturity and put it into the silo. I 

 have fed the corn just before we commenced filling the silo and during 

 the time we have put it into the silo and after it had gone through the 

 heating process in the silo I thought my cows did better trom the 

 corn from the silo than they did to feed it from the field green. We 

 have tried oats and peas and Hungarian, but there are none of those 

 feeds that come up in milk production with second crop clover. As to 

 what Governor Hoard said about the raising of clover. There are 

 many sections of Vermont where there is a good deal of clover raised; 

 there are other sections where there is not so much raised as there 

 should be. T. B. Terry, whom most of you know, when he was at an 

 agricultural meeting in Morrisville a few years ago some one asked him 



