A COMPARATIVE STATEMENT. 117 



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Mr. Roberts. No, sir. We do not make cheese. I don't 

 know much about making cheese. 



Dr. Wakefield. Here you have, gentlemen, a specimen 

 of a very good butter cow. If you could bring all the cows 

 in the Commonwealth up to that standard, you would then 

 be in a very good position to grow and breed for cheese. I 

 think the gentleman ought to feel satisfied with that animal 

 as a butter cow, and go on with some of these other experi- 

 ments. I have no doubt they are coming. I did not know 

 we had got so near perfection in the butter-making animal 

 as it seems we have. 



Mr. Roberts. I have become satisfied that a good milk- 

 ing-cow must eat about three per cent of her live weight 

 daily of hay, or hay and corn-fodder cut together. Mr. Ells- 

 worth has described a dairy cow that fills my eye. The 

 Swiss cow is not such an animal to look at. She is a coarse, 

 heavy-necked, heavy-bodied cow. She knocks all my theories 

 " higher than a kite." If the Swiss breed can do any thing 

 near what this cow does, they are the butter breed. I find, 

 in running this cow with Jerseys, that, on an average, the 

 Jerseys give a little richer milk, and the butter from the 

 Jerseys is of better color. A Swiss cow fed on hay, bran, 

 and roots, would make very white butter ; whereas the Jer- 

 seys would make very good-colored butter. A Swiss cow, 

 to make good-colored butter in winter, needs corn-meal. 



Mr. . Observation has taught me that circum- 

 stances and conditions have a great deal to do with the 

 characteristics of cows. Will } t ou please to describe the ♦ 

 arrangement of the stable in regard to light, &c, in which 

 those cows were kept when those tests were made ? 



Mr. Roberts. So far as the arrangements for light and 

 all those things were concerned, you could not have much 

 poorer ones. The only sunlight that reaches our cow-stable 

 reached it in the afternoon, on the opposite side of the stable 

 from where the cows stood ; so that very little sunlight ever 

 struck our cows. We endeavor to make good butter, and 

 we commence to make our butter when xve plant our carrots. 

 We plant carrots for working into the butter of young Jer- 

 seys. We grow those carrots as well as we know how, and 

 put them into the barn to be used for this purpose ; so that 

 all the hay and all the roots that those cows have eaten lias 



