54 WE FARM FOR A HOBBY 



Finally I asked the Bureau of Home Economics, 

 U. S. Department of Agriculture, what to do. The 

 reply was Farmers Bulletin Number 1438, wherein 

 the mystery stands revealed. This bulletin, by the 

 way, also gives a good recipe for making sauer- 

 kraut, a job which is usually done free-hand by 

 semi-pros in this part of the country, and which is 

 another of the things like dill-pickle preserving 

 and the proper way to boil crustaceans (my copy 

 of Fannie Farmer starts a shrimp recipe with "re- 

 move shrimp from can"!), conspicuously absent 

 from my collection of cook books. 



Government bureaus often supplement the 

 printed word with a letter. A couple of years ago 

 the notion beset me that my man was overfeeding 

 the cows. My childhood recollection was that what- 

 ever you fed a cow above a certain limit went to 

 fat instead of milk. I wrote the State Bureau of 

 Animal Industry and got, in addition to a flood 

 of informative printed matter, a letter pointing out 

 that, just as (per the old Montgomery and Stone 

 routine) "you can't skin a manager," so you can't 

 overfeed a cow that has "the true dairy tempera- 

 ment": the more you feed her or, put it: the more 

 feed she can take the more milk she will pro- 

 duce. If she is the kind of cow that turns feed into 

 fat, then the quicker you fatten her and find it out 

 the sooner you can get rid of her. 



The most disturbing thing about all this in- 



