262 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



a half hour, so as to finish a piece of work he has in hand. With his 

 heavj' milkers, he will have a loss of 10 to 20 per cent and the entire 

 herd will shrink, and if this .irregular milking is continued as a habit 

 the herd will not yield the profit they otherwise would if system was 

 used. So that to sum up, it is as much the care as the feed as to the 

 profit derived from feeds consumed. 



I have now presented to you the possibilities of liberal summer feea- 

 ing. I will now take up the subject of winter feeding. As I have- 

 before stated, we can have green feeds 365 days in the year if we so 

 desire, and the farmer wbo does not have them for his stock, from his 

 steers down to his chickens, is a good way in the rear of the band wagon, 

 and should get a move on himsell and be abreast with the most advanced 

 of his brother farmers, who have made provision for green, succulent 

 feeds right through the winter months. In my boyhood days 1 was very 

 fortunate in having a father who was always studying his business and 

 who looked on farming as a profession that required as much gray mat- 

 ter as any of the recognized professions (at that time farming was not 

 classed as a profession). He early learned that to carry a herd 'of cows 

 through the long winters of Wisconsin, it took something more than dry 

 hay and grain to make dairying profitable; he recognized the advantages 

 of succulent feeds but having no silo, and at that time never having 

 heard of one, he had to get his succulent feeds fi"*om other sources. He 

 found this in roots; beets, turnips and carrots were the crops we raised 

 for the cows, and at that time we were well satisfied with the results. 

 At the present time we can get the succulent properties in feeds much 

 cheaper than in growing roots, that is for a number of cattle. If I were 

 to live in town and only wished to keep one or two cows, I would still 

 depend upon the root crop for succulence, as there are but few who keep 

 a cow in town but what have enough ground to produce enough roots 

 to keep their dow well during the winter. But to return to the subject 

 as it affects the dairymen at large, let me urge the necessity of having 

 silos; you can not reach the highest success in your dairy unless you 

 have an abundace of ensilage, not only during the winter months, but 

 during the summer ones as well. Let me illustrate the latter proposi- 

 tion with some figures that we obtained during the year of 1901, when 

 our c'ows had no grass from the 1st of July to the 28th of May, 1902. 



When the last feed of our soiling crops are fed in the fall, how for- 

 tunate we should feel to know that our cows and all other farm animals 

 will continue to receive green feed and not be subjected to the shrink in 

 both milk yield and bodily weight as well, as in the case of animals that 

 ,are put on dry feed. Not only will our animals continue to give us the 

 same results as they were in being fed the soil crops, but we will make 

 the change without increasing the cost of the daily rations. I have found 

 that my ensilage is the cheapest feed that I produce on the farm. To 

 illustrate, let me give the amount of feed in days and weeks that an 

 acre of corn in the silo represents. I am making these statements after 

 using ensilage for the past seventeen years. This fall I went through 

 our corn field and cut representative hills enough to get a fair average 

 and found that the yield exceeded nineteen tons per acre. Now as it 

 requires from thirty-five to forty pounds t)f ensilage to feed a cow daily. 



