414 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



seeds or sereenings usually earry more or less broken flaxseed and 

 contain much more crude fat and crude fiber than wheat middlings. 

 However, their palatability and digestibility are questionable. It 

 is a question for the stock feeder to decide for himself, whether he 

 shall feed his stock with pure wheat middlings or whether he shall 

 use the same, mixed with weed seeds. If the ingredients of these 

 feeds are plainly legible on the bags containing them, he can readily 

 choose one from the other. The many weed seeds w'hich are always 

 present in screenings are of various composition. Some are noxious 

 and poisonous in their nature and may seriously impair the health 

 of the animals in question. 



No. 24 is a sample of ground corn cobs. It is needless to comment 

 on the feeding value of ground corn cobs in the ration. That they 

 are cheap is well known. They carry over 30 per cent, of crude 

 fiber or indigestible matter and are of a very tough and fibrous 

 nature. We have found a large number of wheat middlings so 

 adulterated in our State, and in some cases as high as 40 per cent, 

 of cobs w^ere used. In the case of No. 20, with 11.35 per cent, of 

 protein, which was sold as pure wheat middlings for |31 per ton, a 

 purchaser would obtain only 7.3 pounds of protein for |1.00; whereas, 

 in the case of No. 17, having IS per cent, of protein which sold for 

 f33 per ton, he would* receive 11 pounds of protein for |1.00. In 

 other words, when he bought a shipment of feed like No. 20, he was 

 paying at the rate of |31 per ton for 858 pounds of ground corn 

 cobs. It is obvious that although the cheaper article was sold for 

 $2.00 less per ton, the value of the money invested, was not received 

 in this case. 



No. 21 is a wheat bran which is alive with small beetles. These 

 beetles are very often found in wheat feeds and in poultry feeds. 

 No. 31 contains a few of the same and a few worms found from 

 time to time in some of the samples received. 



A large number of molasses feeds are found on the market, the 

 composition of which is decidedly varied and interesting. The 

 principal ingredients of inferior quality used in these feeds are rice 

 hulls, oat hulls, barley hulls, weed seeds or wheat screenings, buck- 

 wheat hulls, cottonseed hulls, ground corn cobs and in some instances 

 ground peanut hulls. These, together with a small proportion of 

 cereals such as corn, oats, brew^ers' grains, malt sprouts, cotton- 

 seed meal, etc., and a liberal supply of molasses to cover up the 

 deception, constitute many of our poor quality molasses feeds. The 

 samples, No. 28 and 30 are good illustrations of such feed. No. 29 

 is such a feed alive with meal mites, w'hich are so small that they 

 cannot he readily detected with the unaided eye, yet by close in- 

 spection, the feed may be seen to have motion and be literally alive 

 with these small insects. Many of these feeds are wet and musty, 

 afl"ording a prime condition for the growth of beetles and mites, and 

 it is impossible to believe that any man could be persuaded to feed 

 such material to his stock. The weed seeds contained in these 

 feeds, will, if the life is not destroyed by some process such as 

 heating or grinding, pass through the animal, be transplanted to 

 the fields and contaminate the grains grown thereon. Some of the 

 seeds are of such a nature as to poison the system or disarrange 

 the functions of digestion, as previously stated. Tlie corn cockle, 

 for example, is said to contain a poisonous substance called sapo- 



