CHANGES IN FARMING. 347 



yielded. Let me ask here, do the fanners of Maine generally look 

 at it in this business like manner of considering net profits ? What 

 proportion of these 80,000 men make it their uniform endeavor to 

 keep running on their farms as few of these expensive machines as 

 can convert their forage crops into what they want manufactured 

 by them ? How many strive to run these machines fully up to 

 the safe maximum of speed and efficiency ? On the other hand 

 with how many is it the habitual thought and care to give out as 

 little raw material as they can and make a show of business ; or 

 do "middling well?" 



If your animals possessed unlimited powers of digestion and 

 assimilation, so that one cow could manufacture all the milk, and. 

 one beeve all the meat which your grass, hay and provender was 

 capable of making, the food of support would be comparatively a 

 trivial matter, and might receive little thought ; but such is very 

 far from being the fact. The truth is, that the limits of production 

 are quite narrow at the best. 



From such data as I have been able to obtain there appears to 

 be required, with the average of good animals, not far from two 

 per cent, of their live weight of good hay daily, (or the equivalent 

 in other food) as the food of support. So that, if your steer or 

 farrow cow weighs 1000 lbs. they each require twenty pounds daily 

 of hay to sustain it in such condition that the scales would show 

 neither gain nor loss, but just "hold their own." The food of 

 support is a tolerably uniform amount, and is as much for an 

 inferior animal as for a superior one. But the food of production 

 varies much with different animals. Some can convert into meat 

 or milk a tenth part as much as is required for support, some a 

 sixth, some a fifth, some a fourth, some a third, some half as much 

 and some more than that. If your animal is a good' feeder and 

 has ability to secrete milk abundantly, or to lay on flesh and fat 

 rapidly, it may digest and assimilate twice as much food as is 

 necessary for its support alone, and in such a case a full half of 

 what is consumed would be converted into flesh or milk. In 

 other cases you get only a third, a quarter, a fifth, a sixth, an 

 eight or a tenth according to their ability to do profitable work. 

 Their value as converters of forage into more valuable products 

 is exactly as the ratio which the food of production that they 

 consume bears to the food of support ; and if this be so, very little 

 arithmetic is required to prove that if you have the equivalent of 

 fifty tons of hay and twenty cows to consume it, and they use 



