PREPARING FOODS FOR STOCK 129 



Cakes may be ground down to a meal, or may be 

 broken into small pieces or " nuts." In the latter case 

 the cake is said to be "nutted." Some cake manu- 

 facturers are making the cake into cakettes, and in a 

 few cases small "nuts" or cubes of one inch each side; 

 the great advantage being that it dispenses with 

 nutting the cakes on the farm. 



6. Softening Coarse Poods. Coarse, hard con- 

 centrates like undecorticated cotton cakes should be 

 nutted for a week or a fortnight before being fed to 

 stock, as the nutted cake absorbs moisture from the air 

 and becomes very much softer. Apart from this, nails 

 may sometimes be detected and removed before feeding. 



Hay and straw chop, wheat chaff, and oat chaff may 

 be mixed with pulped roots, and possibly water added. 

 The mass is left for at least half a day to enable the 

 moist roots and water to soften the coarse straw, and 

 later bring about slight fermentation, so as to make 

 the ration more attractive to stock. 



Inferior foods are often used up in this way, the 

 food being made attractive with treacle, locust-bean 

 meal, or other condimental foods (see p. 76). 



7. Steeping. Many folks believe that if con- 

 centrated foods are steeped in water and fed to milking 

 cows in the form of a thick gruel or "crowdy," that 

 the yield of milk will be increased. This may be the 

 result for a short time after the commencement, but 

 experiments at Offerton Hall, County Durham, do 

 not show that this method of preparing the food is 

 justified by results. 



It is not advisable to give either wheat or barley 

 in the raw state to horses; in fact, wheat is often blamed 

 for giving horses "fever of the feet" (laminitis). If, 

 however, these foods have been previously steeped, 



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