40 Report of the Department of Animal Husbandry of the 



times deceptive, so that it will be a distinct gain when commercial 

 cattle foods are branded with their real percentages of protein 

 and fat, as presumably will be the case in New York under the 

 operation of the new feeding stuff law. 



Moreover, buyers should understand something of the source 

 and general nature of the waste products which make up a large 

 proportion of our commercial feeding stuffs. The fact that any 

 material is an offal from a manufacturing process may or may not 

 mean that it is of inferior nutritive value. As an illustration, 

 certain parts of the maize kernel which appear in the gluten meals 

 and hominy wastes are from the parts of the grain in no way 

 inferior, whereas oat hulls are the least valuable part of the seed. 

 These facts establish an important distinction between the by- 

 products from starch and glucose manufacture and those from the 

 manufacture of breakfast foods from oats. For this and similar 

 reasons, the ingredients of the various mixed feeding stuffs should 

 be clearly stated for the buyer's benefit, and the provision of our 

 new feeding stuff law which, among other things, makes illegal 

 the abominable practice of adulterating corn meal with oat hulls, 

 without the knowledge of the purchaser, to be sold to him as 

 mixed feed from corn and oats, is a step in the direction of en- 

 forced honesty in the cattle food trade. 



CLASSIFICATION OF FEEDING STUFFS. 



Cattle foods are often classified in a popular way as " carbohy- 

 drate " and " nitrogenous." Such a division into two classes, 

 based upon the proportions of carbohydrates and protein, is not 

 rational. The fact is, there is a quite uniform gradation in the 

 percentage of protein in feeding stuffs from cotton-seed meal to 

 wheat straw and there seems to be no natural point of separation 

 into two groups. It is absurd to place wheat bran with 16 per 

 ct. of protein in the same group with cotton-seed meal with 45 

 per ct. of protein. 



