WINTER FEEDING OF COWS. 331 



of which the dairyman must be the judge. If she has been 

 thoroughly driven in her lacteal yields for the past eight or nine 

 months, three months is none too much time for her to rest, and 

 properly recuperate her faculties for another season. It is also 

 doubtful whether, in ordinary cheese and butter dairies, the extra 

 expense of forcing her with stimulating milk-producing foods, 

 will pay during the inclement seasons, when all dairy work must 

 be prosecuted at comparative disadvantage. That must be left 

 to the judgment of the dairyman. 



If the cow be reduced in flesh by her severe toils at the pail 

 and she cannot but be somewhat so, if a really good milker, and 

 with plenty of milk-creating food she must, to continue her 

 usefulness, be fully recruited during the winter. She may be 

 dried off in December. She should produce her calf in the latter 

 part of March or by the tenth of April, at the latest. Her 

 winter forage should be soft, sweet, well cured hay cut when 

 the grass is not earlier than in its first bloom, and before the seed 

 hardens into ripening, of whatever kind of grass the hay be 

 made. When a large stock is kept, the hay may not always be 

 thus seasonably made. If not, it should be as near to it as pos- 

 sible. Hay alone will not recruit lean cows during the winter, 

 into good dairy condition for the coming season. Indian corn, 

 oat, barley and rye meal, or wheat bran, or middlings from flour 

 mills, buckwheat meal, or roots, may be resorted to for assist- 

 ance; but at all events the cow should be restored to good con 

 dition for the proper production of her calf, and the wear and 

 tear of the succeeding season of hard milking. The hay for feed- 

 ing should be cut short, as when in giving milk, say a quarter, and 

 not to exceed half an inch long, in a machine. It is better, and 

 a saving of at least one-fifth to one-fourth in quantity of con- 

 sumption. If the meal, with plenty of water, be sprinkled upon 

 it, and well mixed, she will thrive all the better. 



Roots are a good winter and spring food for cows, particularly 

 to promote the flow of milk when about calving. The kinds of 



