344 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



FEEDING AND MANAGEMENT OF A DAIRY HERD. 



E. C. Pope, Manchester. 



I am going to talk to you principally on the individual feeding 

 of cows, the only sort of feeding with which I am familiar. 1 

 do not advocate individual feeding for every dairyman, but it 

 may be more or less useful to any man who can be his own 

 feeder. It is seldom that a dairyman can hire a feeder suffi- 

 ciently intelligent and interested to profit by the methods I shall 

 outline. Still, treating his cows merely as a herd, a good fee 'er, 

 in the habit of watching the milk scales, can check a sudden 

 drop in the milk flow, due to weather or feed conditions, by 

 giving a feed or two of second crop clover hay, or prevent a 

 drop in summer by feeding com meal or cottonseed meal at the 

 beginning of a cold storm. 



About 1905, the only grains we were feeding were bran, com 

 meal and cottonseed meal, and the rations were small at that. 

 Our best cow gave us 7,000 p>ounds of milk in a year. Prof. 

 Walter A. Conant came to us, asked for the privilege of experi- 

 menting in our herd, and offered to teach us individual feeding. 

 My brother and I worked under his direction for about two 

 years. The eflfect of good feeding is cumulative ; a cow that has 

 been poorly fed will not reach her maximum production the 

 first year that she is well fed, but her work will be likely to im- 

 prove for several years. After four or five years of individual 

 feeding, the average yearly production of milk for our herd of 

 Jerseys and grade Jerseys reached 7,000 pounds, and our best 

 cows were giving 9,000 to 10,000 pounds a year. 



As a general rule, you will not get marked results from in- 

 creasing the ration after a cow has been in milk six weeks, gains 

 after that time usually being slight and expensive, therefore the 

 cow should be fed to bring her up to full flow within that time, 

 and efforts after that should be to prevent any abnormal drop 

 in the milk flow, for a falling-off that lasts three or four days 

 will probably not be regained before the next calving, and will 



