DAIRY MEETING. II3 



that is wrong. You can raise a ton of oats and peas on every 

 acre, in grain, and a cow that has a ton of grain fed to her 

 judiciously through the milking period is pretty well fed, as 

 to grain. You may have to balance that up a little, and if you 

 do, simply go into the market and buy those feeds that are 

 worth almost as much as fertilizer as for food, like gluten feeds 

 and cottonseed, some of those nitrogenous foods; but never 

 exceed two pounds of the concentrated food in a ration. I have 

 met men who are feeding as high as six pounds of those con- 

 centrated feeds, but in my opinion they are making a great 

 mistake. 



I am going to say a word about oats and peas. You should 

 put those in as early in the spring as possible. I find by talking 

 with some gentlemen who raise their own feed that there are 

 localities in which it is impossible to raise peas, but I conclude 

 they can be raised here. The value of oats as a food I do not 

 need to mention. The chemist can analyze coarse bran and 

 oats, and the analysis may not show any more feeding value 

 in the oats than in the bran, but you and I know that if we are 

 driving a horse there is nothing that fits him like oats. They 

 have a certain nerve-producing, energizing value that the chem- 

 ist cannot get at, and that is just as valuable for the milch cow 

 and the laying hen as it is for the horse. I do not know why 

 it is so, but you who have had experience know that this is a 

 fact. So added to the value of the protein feed you have the 

 energizing value of the ground oats for the milch cow that 

 you cannot duplicate. 



Now, then, you are shy of protein. We think we have to go 

 into the market and buy the protein of our foods. All our hays 

 except clover contain mostly carbonaceous material, our corn 

 is starchy, so we have to balance these up. Hence we put the 

 peas in with the oats, then we have the protein added and we 

 have very nearly the kind of ration that we want, raised on our 

 own farms. One acre of oats and peas, seeded two bushels of 

 oats and one of peas to the acre, will supply a milch cow during 

 her milking period very nicely, and we have cut off one-half to 

 three-fourths of the feed bills, which it seems to me is a great 

 advantage. For many years we have reduced the concentrated 

 grain fed to the cows, in that way. 

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