202 Food for Agricultural Stock. 



weight of increased produce tliaw there was of manure employed. 

 The case is very different in the supply of food to our stock. 

 The quantity of the constituents returned in the solid and liquid 

 excrements, and in the increase of the animal, mast invariably 

 be very much less than was contained in the food consumed. 

 No concentration of constituents, nor any amount of supply of 

 some only, of those required for the respiration, the per sjii ration, 

 the excitements, and the increase, can enable the animal to obtain 

 a particle of what is requisite for these, from any other source 

 than his food. 



In the case of stock-foods therefore, the scope for economical 

 manufacture or concentration is very limited. Among the 

 natural complex foods, hay may be said to be more concentrated 

 than straw, and corn more concentrated than hay. Of the 

 individual non-nitrogenous or so-called respiratory and fat-form- 

 ing constituents of food, fatty matter is very much more concen- 

 trated than starch or sugar. But our ruminant animals carmot 

 thrive upon exclusively concentrated food, even though it be so 

 in the limited degree in which it exists in corn. They require 

 a certain amount of the bulky but innutritious woody fibre, 

 which they find already combined with other constituents in hay 

 or straw. Those animals, such as pigs, which do not require the 

 same proportion of woody fibre for their digestive operations, are 

 provided with a suitable combination of starch, sugar, oil, nitro- 

 genous substance, and mineral matters, already formed in corn and 

 other natural foods, far more economically than they could be sup- 

 plied with them by the intervention of manufacturing processes. 



There is, in fact, only one manufactured staple article of food 

 employed by the farmer with advantage on the large scale. 

 This is oilcake. Even oilcake is not manufactured exclusively 

 for the purposes of feeding : it is the residue of a process for 

 obtaining oil, the value of which to a great extent meets the 

 cost of the production of the cake. The cake was produced 

 before there was any demand for it as food for stock. It would 

 continue to be produced if the farmer did not so employ it. Its 

 price as food is not regulated so much by the cost of production 

 as by Avhat the farmer will give for it in competition with other 

 articles. It may be mentioned, however, that many of the 

 recently-introduced manufactured foods cost four or five times as 

 much, weight for weight, as our most nutritive oilcakes. 



From all that has been said, it will be clear that these newly 

 manufactured foods cannot substitute any of the necessary con- 

 stituents contained in our ordinary stock foods any further than 

 they themselves supply them. So far as the mere supply of 

 alimentary constituents is concerned, a mixture of linseed or 

 oilcake, and corn-meal, can provide these at one- fourth to one- 



