378 On increasing our Supplies of Animal Food. 



these. At 6 weeks the mid-day meal of milk is discontinued, 

 and at 14 weeks they are weaned altogether. At that time their 

 allowance of cake is increased, and they readily eat enough to 

 improve in condition : they are put to grass, and the cake then 

 gradually diminished as they take to this kind of food. They are 

 not permitted to lie out late at night in autumn, but are soon 

 brought in and receive foddering of tares or clover. When put 

 on turnips they receive 1 lb. of cake each in the yards daily, 

 which keeps them improving; and this continues till spring, when 

 they are again put to grass, and then it is discontinued. They 

 are brought in the second autumn, and are fed liberally on turnips 

 and Swedes, «Scc., during the second winter, and may be sold fat 

 in the following May. 



There are two sides even to this subject, however, and there are 

 advantages connected with the purchase over the breeding of your 

 stock, which, if you can easily obtain stock of good quality, may 

 justify the abandonment of the latter plan. The chief of them 

 is its economical use of the farm's resources. When full-grown 

 stock are purchased and brought to a farm, they remove from it 

 when sold only the fat and flesh with which its crops have supplied 

 them. When fat stock, bred at home, are sold, the whole of their 

 substance is an extraction from the land, which, if bones are thus 

 taken from it, must be replenished with bone-dust purchased for 

 the purpose, or it will worsen in the process. In the former case 

 the food purchased more than balances the material removed 

 from the land ; in the latter, manures as well as food must be 

 bought if fertility is to be maintained. Still there is no doubt 

 that to breed one's own stock diminishes the demand, which 

 would otherwise injuriously increase, upon our supplies of lean 

 stock, which are probably on the decline. 



c. Another method of diminishing this demand, and so of 

 suiting it more accurately to the supply, is to keep on fattening 

 stock fully up to maturity before selling it as beef; and it is a 

 question which the Society has put — how far it may be advisable 

 thus to abandon the system of sending stock to the butcher at a 

 very early age? Probably the right answer is — the earlier the 

 age the better, provided that, whatever it be, the animal shall 

 have attained full maturity and such a degree of fatness as the 

 market requires. The more rapid the process of feeding, the 

 less the operation of all those constant sources of waste which the 

 lungs and other excretory organs of the animal create ; and the 

 more complete the growth and maturity of the animal before it is 

 sold, the fewer will be the individuals required to convert a given 

 quantity of food, and thus the less will be the demand upon an 

 already overtaxed supply of lean stock, and the less will be the 

 demand for bone and other substances out of the soil of which 



