122 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



protein or that will give you protein at the lowest possible price 

 per pound. We are great consumers of breakfast foods of 

 various kinds, and in the manufacture of the breakfast foods we 

 accumulate a large amount of hulls like oat hulls, and these 

 come into the hands of the great producers, and some of these 

 producers have great stocks of oat hulls which have just about 

 the same feeding value as oat straw, which they want to sell. 

 They will add more or less of other concentrates to these feeds, 

 and put them upon the markets with enticing names. You are 

 not wise if you buy them, when it is protein that you want. 

 Cottonseed meal is not of as good quality as it used to be. It 

 probably never will be of as high quality as formerly. There 

 is a larger demand, and if the dealers can sell cottonseed hulls 

 at the price of the meats of the cottonseed, they are bound to 

 sell it. I doubt if we can count on getting more than 41 per 

 cent protein now when we used to get 44.5 and occasionally 47 

 or 48. We have analyzed a good deal of cottonseed meal this 

 fall that carried 38 per cent protein. Suppose it has 40 per 

 cent; you buy a ton and you get 800 pounds, and this 800 

 pounds of protein has cost you $30 a ton in the cottonseed. 

 The protein has cost you, then, 3^ cents per pound. You go 

 to the store and buy an oat feed which we will assume will carry 

 12 per cent protein and if you pay $18 a ton for that your pro- 

 tein is costing you 75^ cents per pound. So in the oat feed 

 your protein is costing you twice as much per pound as in the 

 cottonseed meal, even at $30 and not of as good quality as it used 

 to be. If you are interested, send for our last feeding stuff 

 inspection bulletin, which has an article along this line. 



There is another thing I want to say : We have had a feed- 

 ing inspection law in this State for years. We were the first 

 State to adopt a feeding stuffs law ; all the eastern states now 

 have a law very much like ours. The result is that practically 

 all of the feeding stuffs are sold on their merits today ; and in 

 order that you may be sure that you are getting what you ought 

 to get W'hen you buy a feeding stuff, particularly when you do 

 not know very much about it, open the bag, stir it down to the 

 depth of a foot, take out about a pint, put it into a tin spice box 

 or something of that kind, and put your name and address on it 

 and do it up and send it to the Experiment Station, and we will 

 tell you, usually within 48 hours, exactlv how much protein it 



