298 MISSOURI AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



Mr. Mallory — Do you give it fresh milk? 



Mr. Haecker — Yes, fresh milk from its dam for one week, ranging- 

 from 3 to 4 pounds at a feed. I feed twice a day. If it is a medium 

 sized calf, it gets 3 pounds, a large one gets as much as 4 pounds. It would 

 be better to feed during noon for a week or two, but as a rule we are 

 pretty busy and make the calf wait till evening. One objection to feed- 

 ing three messes of milk is that when you feed him at noon you will have 

 to save the morning's milk and you do not know what gets into it in 

 the mean time. After the first week, give half whole milk and half 

 skim milk. After the second week we give the separator skim milk in in- 

 creasing quantity, because the skim milk is just as heavy feed as the 

 whole milk and here is where a great many farmers make a mistake. 

 They think this is skim milk, and I must give the calf a lot of milk to 

 make up for it. The chances are the next morning the calf has scours 

 or colic and half of the calves that die are killed in this way, by over- 

 feeding. After the third week I give it possibly a pound more of milk and 

 add one teaspoonful of ground flax. If you have no ground flax, I 

 would use at first oil meal for a week or two and then I would gradually 

 change over to corn meal, using only a little in the milk. Then I would 

 increase the skim milk and the flax meal at such a rate that. by the time 

 the calf is 4 months old he is getting 10 pounds of separator skim milk 

 per meal and a tablespoonful of the meal. 



Mr. How would cottonseed meal do? 



Mr. Haecker — It is objectionable because it contains the same nutri- 

 ents that skim milk docs, has a very high per cent of protein and so has 

 milk. For that reason we either take flax, which is one-third fat and 

 change over as soon as possible to corn meal, which has a liigh per cent 

 of carbohydrates to balance up the ration. Wc have been raising calves 

 for fifteen years in this way where we have weighed every mess. Every 

 calf was weighed each week and the growth that we got and development 

 of the calf is just as satisfactory as is the case when we feed whole milk. 



DAIRY BRED STEERS. 



A matter in which you are all interested is this. During the last 

 5 years I have also reserved some dairy steers, and liavc brought them 

 up just in this way, giving them skim milk as we do the heifers that arc 

 growing and as they got larger giving them a little more meal, feeding 

 them regularly the ordinary mixture of meal, prairie hay and silage ; so 

 that when they are two years old the most fattened ones are getting about 

 7 pounds of meal, thnt 's tlic ones weighing about 1.200 pounds, while 

 the smaller ones like the Jerseys, are getting about 5 pounds. We have 



