EXPERIMENT STATION. 



103 



hay and increasing the bran or linseed meal, for example, would 

 have resulted in an increased milk production, while, if the feed 

 had been made even richer than the standard ration, still more 

 milk might have been obtained. 



But m practice the question to be solved is not what ration 

 produces the most milk. If that were all, the problem before the 

 feeder would be a comparatively simple one. The question is, 

 what ration produces milk at the greatest profit, and the answer 

 to this must obviously depend not only on the producing power 

 of the ration, but on its cost, the price of the milk, the cost of 

 labor, etc., and will be likely to be quite different under diverse 

 circumstances. It is not difficult, however, to compute with a 

 fair degree of accuracy whether, in any given case, an improve- 

 ment of the ration by the addition of more protein is likely to be 

 profitable. 



As an example of the manner of making such a calculation, I 

 have taken Mr. Gold's ration. At the time of these observations 

 about 40 cows were being fed, and they averaged about 6 quarts 

 of milk per day. Reducing Wolff's standard to the amounts 

 called for by a cow weighing 850 pounds, the estimated weight 

 of Mr. Gold's, we get 



Total dry matter, 20.40 lbs. 



Digestible protein, . _ 2.13 " 



" carbhydrates. 10.63 " 



'■ fat... 0.34 " . 



If, now, in Mr. Gold's ration we replace four pounds of hay by 

 one and three-fourths pounds of linseed meal, we get a ration cor- 

 responding very nearly to the standard, viz : 



If the hay saved by this method of feeding could have been 

 sold at $13.13 per ton, it would have just paid for the extra 

 linseed meal used at $30.00 per ton, leaving the extra yield of 



milk on the better ration as so much grained. 



Or, in case it was 



