DAIRY, SEED IMPROVEMENT, STOCK BREEDERS MEETINGS. 35I 



ting short. It does not pay to keep them out late in the fall to 

 save hay, for, once they get stunted, it is next to impossible to 

 get them back into good growing condition again,. 



We are short of hay this winter, and are feeding our year- 

 lings on oat straw with a considerable growth of witchgrass 

 in it, and by supplementing this with grain and silage, we are 

 getting a first-class growth on the heifers, and they are eating 

 the straw pretty clean. Straw alone is mighty poor feed, but 

 we have never had a bunch of heifers do better on any feed, 

 than these have done on this combination. 



We begin to feed grain to calves by the time they are two 

 months old ; a mixture of bran, ground oats, oil meal, corn 

 meal and feed flour, with the addition of Ajax and gluten when 

 they get to five or six months, dropping out the expensive oil 

 meal and ground oats. In winter, the calves will take silage to 

 advantage when they get to be six or eight weeks old. Keep 

 your calves growing, but do not on any account let them get 

 fat. The better the calf, and the more highly you prize it, the 

 greater the danger of overfeeding. 



I want to endorse the talk that Dr. Pearl gave you the other 

 day, advising against the use of young and untried sires for a 

 dairy herd, or buying a new bull every two or three years. The 

 only criterion to a bull's value as a breeder is the performance 

 of his daughters, and you can know little about that until they 

 reach three or four years of age. While I would not raise 

 a bull from a poor dam, good performance of the dam is no 

 guarantee of performance in her offspring. A few years ago, 

 we bought a cow that would give us 8,000 to 10,000 pounds of 

 five per cent milk a year, an ideal cow for business, and a good 

 looker. We raised three of her heifer calves, and not one of 

 them would give milk enough to pay for barn-room. 



We have been watching progeny for five or six years, and 

 have one bull that we know is good, and another, about three 

 years old, of our own raising, that we are getting a line on, 

 and a bull calf from our best cow to follow along, so that we 

 hope we shall never again be obliged to depend on an untried 

 bull. This method is rather expensive, and a man must be 

 doing quite a business to !be able to afford to keep the two or 

 three bulls needed in order to have a tested bull always available, 

 and must be raising a considerable number of calves in order 



