136 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



tared into butter, and we have robbed the calf of so much. How 

 shall we replace the amount of food we have taken away? We 

 can do it by boiling ground flax and making it into a jelly. A 

 spoonful of this flaxseed jelly in the skim-milk is fine for the 

 calves, it will make them grow. If you follow that method I 

 am sure that you will come out all right. But if you are raising 

 a good many calves and have a small amount of help, that takes 

 considerable time, and if you handle your calves as carefully as 

 you ought, I think you can get around the matter by feeding dry 

 grains. By the time the calf is put on the skim-milk ration it 

 will know enough to eat grain, and I believe there is no better 

 grain to feed a young calf than ground oats. We feed oats to 

 people and we feed oats to horses, and they are exactly as good 

 for calves. If I could have all the ground oats I wanted, with 

 linseed meal, I would not ask for any other grain ration for the 

 dairy calf. Some years, however, when oats are scarce and 

 high, we can hardly afford to feed them. And yet we must 

 take into consideration what we want to do with the calf, — what 

 the calf actually is. Ex-Governor Hoard in one of his speeches 

 said that the young calf when it comes into the world is a large 

 mass of protein stretched over a bony frame-work covered with 

 a nitrogenous skin. That is a pretty good illustration of what 

 the young calf is. What shall we do with it in order to grow 

 and develop it into the future dairy cow? We must not develop 

 the paunch abnormally, without giving the other parts a chance 

 to grow. We must not grow the fore quarters and the hind 

 quarters and leave the barrel devoid of growth. We have got 

 to watch the calf and keep it growing all over. Consequently 

 we wish to make up a grain ration to supplement the skim-milk, 

 which will do this and I have found that about two parts of bran, 

 v/hich is a laxative, furnishing ash and bulk, and one part of 

 corn meal, which is heat-producing and energy producing, to- 

 gether with one part of linseed meal, old process, if you can get 

 it, makes a pretty satisfactory ration. If you can supplement 

 that with oats, you will have a ration which will keep the calf 

 growing all the time. The question comes up : How much 

 shall we feed this young calf? Start in with just a handful. 

 Do not give it any more than it will clean right up immediately. 

 Put the grain in a little box in the pen where the calf can get 

 at it and it will learn to eat in a short time. What kind of 



