Live Stock Breeders' Association. 



165 



FEEDING EXPERIMENTS WITH DIFFERENT KINDS OF ROUGHNESS. 



Our experiments during the past twelve years with various 

 kinds of roughage, both for wintering and for fattening cattle 

 show, however, that the kind of roughness does exert a profound 

 influence upon the cost of gain and a large influence upon the fin- 

 ish or quality of the cattle at the end. These results for fatten- 

 ing cattle are none the less striking than are those for cattle that 

 are being merely wintered. 



The following tables will give in a concise form the essential 

 results of two years' work in which timothy hay, clover hay, and 

 cowpea hay are contrasted. These may be regarded as fairly rep- 

 resentative of all the experiments and as an accurate forecast of 

 what will happen whenever these feeds are offered in comparison 

 one with another: 



COMPARISON OF DIFFERENT ROUGHNESS FOR FATTENING STEERS. 

 First trial — 1SS9-1900 — 119 days — 4 two year old steers in each lot — full fed on shelled corn. 



Second trial — 1900-'01 — 105 days — 4 two year old steers in each lot — full fed on shelled corn. 



♦Clover hay. 

 tCorn stover. 



It will be noted from these tables that in the first trial the 

 combination of corn and timothy produced in the one trial 4.87 

 pounds of gain per bushel of corn, and 5 pounds in the other, or 

 an average of 4.93 pounds for the two trials. When, however, 

 clover or cowpea hay was substituted for timothy, a bushel of corn 

 was capable of producing from 6.44 to 6.74 pounds of gain, or an 



