64 KEEPING (WE COW. 



JERUSALEM ARTICHOKES AS COW-FEED. 



BY CHRISTOPHER SHEAKEK, TUCKERTON, PA. 



Butter and milk are not only luxuries, but in many families they 

 are indispensable necessaries of life. In this article my principal 

 purpose is to show how a cow can be kept with the greatest econ- 

 omy of land and labor. I consider these the essential points 

 in the discussion. Where hay is dear and pasture scarce, a man 

 who lives by the labor of his hands, cannot ordinarily afford to 

 purchase the necessary food for a cow; and if he has only an acre 

 or two of land at his disposal, he finds it more profitable to raise 

 other products. Ordinarily it requires the yield of several acres 

 of land to support a cow. But I propose to show that this can 

 be done en less than one acre, by raising the proper crops, and 

 treating the soil to the best advantage. A cow of ordinary size will 

 consume about eleven thousand pounds of hay, or its equivalent, 

 in a year. The equivalent of this amount of hay is hi potatoes, 

 thirty thousand eight hundred pounds, or five hundred and thir- 

 teen bushels, and in Indian corn, seven thousand seven hundred 

 pounds, or one hundred and thirty-seven bushels. These quan- 

 tities cannot be raised on one acre, and if we examine the tables 

 of equivalents of food, we find that most of the grasses, grains, 

 and roots, are objectionable on account of unproductiveness, want 

 of sufficient nutritive qualities, or of the labor that the cultivation 

 of them requires. 



VALUE OF ARTICHOKES. 



There is, however, a root, or tuber, an acre of which affords 

 enough nourishment to sustain two cows, with less labor than is 

 employed in raising an acre of potatoes and that root is the 

 Jerusalem Artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus). We can depend upon 

 an average yield of from one thousand to one thousand two hun- 

 dred bushels of these tubers from an acre of land rich enough to 

 produce fifty bushels of corn. Pound for pound they are equal 

 in nutritive qualities to potatoes. One cow can therefore be sub- 

 sisted a year on five hundred or six hundred bushels of the tubers, 

 a quantity that can be raised on half an acre of land. But since 

 these roots do not keep over summer, and as the cow will not 

 thrive on them alone, it is necessary to supplement them with dry 

 fodder during winter, and to subsist her on other forage during 

 summer. With the aid of this plant, three-quarters of an acre of 

 land under high cultivation, will nourish a cow during the whole 



