312 ANNUAL REPORT OP THE Off. Doc. 



and in about five or six weeks takes off two tons more, I call that 

 Eman a farmer that does it, and the man who simply cuts off and 

 scrapes oft" white tops and mullen stalks, does not deserve the name 

 of a farmer. You cannot possibly, under any circumstances under 

 God's heaven, expect the dairy business to hold you up as a farmer 

 or to furnish you as palatable food for infants or for society to-day, 

 if you attempt to feed any such trash, and I don't see how you can at- 

 tempt it and call yourself a good citizen of the United States. 



The dairy business is a valuable one. There is no food on this earth 

 so valuable and so nutritious for the infant, for the sick, for the 

 hospital, as milk, and if a man is a true farmer or true dairyman, 

 he would try to make better milk, and if he made better milk he 

 would increase the consumption of milk just in proportion as it be- 

 comes improved and better, and a richer article. He would enlarge 

 his business in that way, like John Wanamaker with his old Market 

 street store starting as a freight depot and winding up with a marble 

 structure; that is Avhat the dairy business ought to be. There is 

 nothing to-day that is taking its rise like agriculture in America; 

 nothing stands higher than the business of the husbandman; noth- 

 ing in the history of the world as we understand, stands higher than 

 agriculture even if you go back to the days of Artaxerxes and Alex- 

 ander the Great. 



When Van Pelt commenced to experiment with the feeding of his 

 Jerseys out there, he found there was nothing like making a proper 

 combination of foods; for instance, if you have flour and water and 

 fruit, and are going to take these ingredients to make a cake, you 

 take your fruit and eat a little bit of this and a little of that, and 

 you taste the sugar and it is just the same when you are going to 

 make a pie as it is when you are going to prepare a ration for a 

 dairy cow. Make your food rations so nice that you will tempt the 

 appetite of the dairy cow to eat it. Take some hay; it is just as 

 necessary for a cow that is a ruminant to have hay as to have any- 

 thing like meal. Try to feed her nothing but bran or nothing but 

 corn meal and see what will become of your cattle. Your cow must 

 have cut hay, and have her cut ensilage and don't just throw it into 

 her in any old way as if you were feeding her with white tops and 

 mullen stalks. You want the very best clover that your farm can 

 grow. You must have such elements down in your soil as phos- 

 phoric acid and potash, so that the plants can convey it to the animal. 

 You start away down with a little plant, look at the difference be- 

 tween the various kinds of plants. Take an apple on the tree, a 

 little knotty, stunted thing that grows in the shade and on a weak 

 limb, and take one of Dr. Funk's splendid Winesapsind put it along- 

 side such a miserable dot of a thing, with a worm in the end, and 

 put it on your table, and compare it with the lucious Winesap. Now 

 it is just the same with the cow. There is hay properly cured, and 

 hay not half cured. You allow it to ripen properly and there is not 

 a cow in the world but will eat it. No cow can digest a clover seed 

 nor any grass seed, but you take it in the condition when it is just 

 worked right and cured right and the food flows right into the plant. 

 You get the potash of the soil. It goes up into the plant and you 

 have a most succulent hay, with the succulence not burned out of it, 

 and you prepare this with the best ensilage, that is, cut hay and 

 use some bran, winter bran, some hay, and the linseed and the gluten 



