1564 The Cornell Reading-Courses 



duction of meat and milk and, in the case of the horse, the production of 

 work. Too little attention has been paid to the proper compounding of 

 rations to get the best returns in product from the money paid out for 

 feed, whether that feed has been actually bought in the market or pro- 

 duced on the farm. Many farmers never set any price on the feeds 

 produced on the farm, considering them merely as feeds procured at no 

 money cost and therefore to be fed without regard to quantity or com- 

 position. 



Instead of feeding in a haphazard manner, a farmer should know, at 

 least approximately, the cost of producing his home-grown feeds, how 

 to plan his rations in order to use these feeds to the best advantage, and 

 how to buy intelligently the feeds on the market. This knowledge will 

 enable him to calculate the most economical ration for the animal he 

 wishes to feed, whether dairy cow, sheep, horse, or beef animal. It is 

 the purpose of the present lesson on stock feeding to set forth, as clearly 

 as possible in a brief lesson, a practical method of computing rations for 

 stock. Before being able to compute a ration intelligently, however, it 

 is necessary to know something of the composition of the animal body and 

 of foods, in order to understand why foods should be grouped in certain 

 proportions to constitute what is called a ration. 



THE ANIMAL BODY 



The body of any animal is made up of water and dry matter, and this 

 water and dry matter must all come from the food. 



Water in the animal body 

 The water in the animal body serves four purposes: first, it is a part 

 of all bone and flesh; second, it serves as a carrier of food from the diges- 

 tive tract, or from those parts of the body where the food is put into 

 suitable shape to be used by the body cells, to those cells wherever they 

 may be located; third, water serves to carry away the wastes of the body 

 through the perspiration and the urine; fourth, it serves to equalize the 

 temperature. This water in the body comes from the water that the 

 animal drinks and from the water in the succulent parts of the food. The 

 water in the animal body constitutes on an average about fifty per cent 

 of the live weight. 



The dry matter of the body 



The dry matter of the body is made up of many chemical elements — 

 for example, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, and 

 perhaps half a dozen others. These elements are arranged in all sorts of 

 combinations, to form the bones, flesh, hide, hair, hoofs, and other parts 

 of the body. For the purpose of this discussion, in order to get a clear 



