DAIRY MEJETING. 169 



of feeding and breeding we will not hear half as much com- 

 plaint regarding sterility and abortion in our herds as we hear 

 now. Thus far I have treated my subject more on the line of 

 what has been considered to be good feeding, or in brief feeding 

 for more milk. My argument would be incomplete should I 

 stop here. We have dairymen who feed wisely and well part 

 of the time and fail to feed well the remainder. The love of 

 milk is so great on some dairy farms in New York and perhaps 

 in the State of Maine, that the little calf is largely deprived of 

 it at a very tender age ; sometimes several days or several weeks 

 before its digestion calls for solid food at all. Hay tea, doc- 

 tored skim-milk or some patent calf food is fed. There can 

 be no doubt but some calves will exist and grow fairly well on 

 this class of food, but the mass of them will become dyspeptic 

 by reason of the lack of nature's food. Good, new milk, until 

 such a time as the little thing's stomach will call for a bite of 

 clover hay or a handful of ground oats, is what it needs. It is 

 step by step humanity is reared from babyhood up into man- 

 hood and womanhood, and there are pitfalls all along the way. 

 A misstep and into the pit the child goes, to come out a cripple 

 or an invalid. All physicians are enabled to agree upon some 

 things, and one of them is that the future destiny of a child is 

 many times fixed during the first two years of its life. As a 

 mouthpiece for the veterinary profession, I will say the first 

 year of a calf's life generally fixes its destiny, and many times 

 the first month of its existence decides its future value in the 

 dairy. When we wander out very far in our calf feeding from 

 what nature provides for it, we are getting on the danger line 

 and treading on slippery places. The desire for milk or the 

 money value it commands frequently leads many to starve the 

 calf to the extent that it grows up much weaker than it was born 

 to be. A cow with a poor digestion is a poor stick in the dairy. 

 There has nothing yet been discovered and there probably never 

 will be, that will take the place of the mother's milk (when it is 

 a balanced milk) in calf raising, early in its life, and good, 

 whole new milk for the first month of its life. In a case where 

 the milk is extremely rich in butter fat, a few hours setting and 

 the removal of a little cream may better balance it for feeding 

 the calf. Some jersey and Guernsey milk are too rich in solids 



