676 Reading-Course for Farmers. 



nutrition as well as intelligent breeding, suitable environment, sufficient 

 shelter and kindly care. 



Successful horse-feeding may be considered as a skilled art. The qual- 

 ities that go to make a good horse-feeder can be acquired neither from 

 lectures nor books, but must, in large measure, be born with the horse- 

 man. Study, observation and especially practice will add to the ability 

 of the feeder, but to be most efficient he must take to the work naturally. 

 All that may be spoken or written will not make one an adept, nor cover 

 his defects if he does not take kindly to the work. One who studies 

 the practices of successful horse-feeders will be impressed with the fact 

 that there are many ways of obtaining the desired end — high finish and 

 fine action in the horse. If we study the ration for horses in a locality 

 we find it usually composed of only one or two kinds of grain and the 

 same limited number of coarse dry fodders, and the feeder insists that 

 this is the most practical and economical ration he can feed with safety 

 to his horses. One need not travel far to find the list of foods more or 

 less changed, sometimes entirely so, yet with the same claim of superi- 

 ority or necessity as before. For example, in one section of the country 

 the most common feeds for the horses are corn or oats for grain, and 

 clover or timothy hay for roughage; in another section crushed barley 

 is the common grain, while the hay comes largely from the wild-oat 

 and barley plants ; in still another section corn serves mainly for grain, 

 with dry corn leaves for the roughage. Thus it seems that the range 

 of food-stuffs that may be fed to horses with safety and success is rather 

 large, yet each section is rather limited in the variety of food composing 

 the ration. 



The horse a machine 



In feeding a working animal the essential product of the food is 

 energy to be used in drawing, walking or trotting, and the like. Plants 

 during growth absorb heat from the sun which is held in the form of 

 energy in the compounds elaborated. When these compounds are taken 

 into the animal body and broken apart by digestion, some of this stored 

 energy is transferred to the animal body. It is the horse that is depended 

 upon to extract this stored energy from the plant and make it serviceable 

 to man. The work horse, therefore, may be compared to a steam engine 

 in which such foods as grain and hay serve as fuel, though it differs from 

 the engine in that steam is not used as the medium between heat and 

 energy. In the horse the food is converted into energy in a different 

 way. It is of interest to note that the horse makes better use of the 



