48 VERMONT AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



avoid inbreeding, they are willing to sell it at a low price, even a 

 beef price. The older animal will get better calves and keep 

 much easier than a young one, for they will take oats and rough 

 fodder that the young one will not thrive upon, and when you are 

 through with him, if well fed, you can sell for beef or to someone 

 else for a breeder, and so get your money back with compound 

 interest compounded every time you raise a heifer calf. 



If you cannot get an old bull, buy a calf and raise it. Be 

 sure you get a good sire of a true dairy breed, of the true dairy 

 form, not a thick-thighed, straight-horned beef type, but a 

 dairy type, with large stomach, heavy body behind, tapering 

 towards the front like a wedge, with long slim neck and broad 

 head and intelligent eyes, soft silky yellow skin, broad, open 

 ribs, well cut up behind, showing plenty of room for udder. 

 When you have such an animal out of a cow with large square, 

 well-placed udder with good teats, and tracing back for several 

 generations of equal merit you are sure to improve. Follow 

 this method and save and raise all the heifer calves you can, 

 milk one season and weed out the poorest, and you are on the 

 road to successs — yes, a macadamized road over which you 

 will soon be driving a herd of 300 pound cows instead of the 

 125 or 150 pound herd you started with. 



CARE OF THE COW. 



We will begin with the calf and grow her up to a cow, 

 First, I practice giving them their mother's milk three days 

 then half of this and half skinrniilk, warm from the separator 

 for a week, gradually working down to all milk from the sepa- 

 rator at three to four weeks old. 



I then add a little linseed or fine feed, a spoonful at first 

 until they eat hay well, then feed only hay, milk and ensilage 

 in preference to meal for you want to train the young cow to 

 grow and develop a large stomach with digestive organs capa- 

 ble of handling large quantities of coarse food, without putting 

 much fat on to her body. It is milk you want her to make for 

 you not beef or fat. This is why I feed new milk when young 

 to develop strong digestive organs and not to weaken them by 

 scours and sickness. Keep them growing and breed them to 

 come in at two years old. Two weeks before they are due to 

 calve I begin to feed them (old or young) a little bran and 

 sometimes linseed meal and potatoes to have them gaining 

 flesh and their bowels loose and healthy. For I don't care how 

 fleshy a cow is, I want to be sure she is gaining flesh when she 

 comes in and my experience proves almost without exception 

 that if gaining flesh she with discharge her afterbirth and come 



