320 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



successfully than ever before, because thousands of farmers 

 have learned how to do it. If our readers -would take our advice and 

 understand why we give the advice, they can do it, and do it at least as 

 successfully as their grandmothers did long before they were born. 



The first thing to get in your mind is that nature, or the power behind 

 nature, loves young things, whether calves, or pigs, or colts, or babes, and 

 that it provides for them in the mother's milk a balanced ration. Where 

 man for any reason disturbs the ration, as he does in taking the cream 

 off milk, he must restore the balance in some other way. Another thing 

 to learn is that nature, or rather the power behind nature, feeds all 

 young things warm milk, about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and a third thing 

 is that it feeds the milk sweet and often. And still another thing to learn 

 is that in the first milk nature provides an aperient or physic and a tonic 

 or stimulant, and gives the youngster this at the very first pull and 

 starts it off in its career free from the mecomium or effete matter con- 

 tained in the bowels at birth. 



Keeping these facts clearly in mind, how shall we go about it to 

 grow the skim-milk calf? First, see that it has not merely milk at the 

 start, but its very own mother's milk. Give it the physic and the stimu- 

 lant which nature has provided, and none other. Either let the calf suck 

 for two or three days or milk its own dam and give it that milk, and give 

 it to it at blood heat. Keep this up for ten days. The milk by that time 

 is fit for use and you may begin adding a little skim-milk at 100 degrees 

 temperature, and in the course of ten days more get it down to a skim- 

 milk diet. As you decrease the full milk, add a little ground flax seed. 

 Or, if you cannot get the ground flax seed, then give it a mixture of 

 ground oats and corn, adding a little at a time. 



The best way to acquaint it with this is to take a little in your hand 

 and after it has drunk its milk put your hand in its mouth and let the 

 stupid youngster get the idea that there is something good besides milk. 

 After thirty days you can give it corn meal alone as a balance, and after 

 it is sixty days old it does not need anything but sweet milk (you can 

 gradually accustom it to taking it cold in the summer time) and good 

 clover hay or grass. 



Put your calves in stanchions, which you can easily make with palings 

 and bolts. Sixteen inches is sufficient space for a calf, and the readiest 

 way to make a stanchion is to take the middle board off a three-board 

 fence and put it above, add another board below, and between these put 

 in your stanchions, using bolts. In front of the stanchions place the 

 trough with divisions every sixteen inches, and in this feed each calf its 

 milk, and after the milk the grain, and let them stand there until after 

 their mouths are dry, then give them good clover hay in the winter or 

 grass in the summer. This, with a dark place to which they can retreat 

 in fly time, and close observation, will enable any man who wants to to 

 grow a first class skim-milk calf. A skim-milk calf grown without a 

 balanced ration is a delusion and a snare. With a balanced ration it can 

 stand up in the feed lot alongside a steer that had the full use of the 



