310 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



tion; they wouldn't know it if they saw it, and they keep their cattle 

 in sheds where there are just a few fence rails put up on each side 

 with a lot of sticks on top. No doubt many of you have seen just 

 such a cow shed as that. I said to one of them, "What do you 

 want for your cow?" He said "Forty five dollars." Why, I laughed 

 at the man; the cow would have been dear at fifteen dollars. I saw 

 a stable not very far from the center of this State in such a condi- 

 tion that I would not have given twenty-five dollars for the whole 

 bunch of twenty-five cattle, in fact, I wouldn't have driven them 

 home. The cattle were in a state of starvation; you couldn't have 

 got them on their feet for three or four months. No cow is going 

 to milk well when she can't shed her coat and she is liable to any 

 and every disease. You are just as likely to run into garget as not 

 when you are going to feed them with their whole system impov- 

 erished and their circulation and skin gone wrong. You take a cow 

 and her circulation is bad and she just stands in that shriveled con- 

 dition with her back humped up, the worst possible condition for a 

 dairy cow. The dairy business will never flourish and succeed any- 

 where under such conditions as those, and it is foolish to expect it. 

 You cannot possibly bring it to pass. If you have scrubby animals, 

 and then feed them scrubby feed, they are going to be the scrubbiest 

 of things. On the other hand, you take a balanced ration, and have 

 your cows balanced, and still more, the feeders balanced because an 

 unbalanced man is the most fortunate of the two— I would rather 

 have a balanced man than a balanced ration for a feeder, because he 

 will know what the cow needs, and he will succeed, while if he 

 does not know that, he never will succeed, whether he sends to the 

 college and gets that ration marked out for him, just as nicely as it 

 ought to be, whether it is a narrow or a mde ration, if he is not 

 master of the situation and master of the individual animal, he will 

 never feed that animal properly. He may feed her, but for the dairy 

 business, he certainly will not succeed. He must know how to adapt 

 his feed to the business and to the animal. 



In looking then at the impoverished condition of some of the cattle 

 which come into the eastern market at certain times of the year, 

 if they were fed twice as much as they usually feed the whole bunch 

 of them, they would be in better condition and in every way be bet- 

 ter. You cannot get a cow into a real working condition in that im- 

 poverished state in less than three or four months, and what does 

 that mean? That means four months of wasted time, or three 

 months of wasted time because that means neglect and carelessness 

 of the man who owns the animal. It is the man who is to blame 

 in every respect. It is the man that makes the cow. It is not the 

 cow's fault if she is bad; he has bred the cow; she has not. It is 

 the man's business to use his intelligence to breed and feed the 

 animal. The whole position puts the man in such a relation to the 

 animal that he is not only the master of the cow, he is the keeper of 

 the cow, the breeder of the cow, and the feeder of the cow. 



Now what should we do with the dairy situation as it is in this 

 country? We must provide the foods that to-day are in the market. 

 You can have brewers' grain or malt stock if you want, or the refuse 

 from the cotton mill or linseed mills, any one of them you can take 

 them and balance them up to keep the animal alive and feed her 

 einough besides to make you a profit, but if you are going to turn 



