288 DOMESTIC ANIMALS, DAIRYING, ETC. 



Practical Feeders' Conclusions Usually Right. As a rule the 

 practical man arrives in the long run at correct conclusions on the 

 main points involved in his practice. This is perhaps more true of 

 the cattle feeder than of any other class of farmers, for several rea- 

 sons : First, he is among the most intelligent and progressive of the 

 farming class. Second, giving most of his attention to the buying, 

 feeding and marketing of cattle, makes him in a large sense a spe- 

 cialist in this particular branch of agriculture. Third, he has oppor- 

 tunities for checking up his observations and judgment with accurate 

 data that men in other lines of farming do not have. This comes 

 about because, as a rule, he buys his cattle by weight and has, there- 

 fore, an accurate knowledge of the cattle at the time he begins his 

 feeding operations. He always sells by weight and has, therefore, the 

 weight of his cattle at the close, and can easily determine quite ac- 

 curately, the gain. Furthermore in many instances, he buys a large 

 portion, and frequently all of the feed used, which enables him to 

 determine with a fair degree of accuracy the amount of food con- 

 sumed. These are the necessary data, of course, for reliable con- 

 clusions as to the outcome of his feeding operations. Fourth, the pro- 

 fessional feeder is of necessity more or less of an experimenter. He is 

 forced by the varying supply of different kinds of feed to vary the 

 material fed from season to season, and thus one season while he may 

 naturally prefer a certain grain or hay the supply is inadequate or 

 the price is too high, and he adopts another. Normally he might 

 prefer to feed his corn whole, but the price may be such as to warrant 

 him in grinding it, and so on throughout the entire range of steer 

 feeding. The state of the feeder market will justify his feeding three 

 or four year olds in one season, heifer calves in another, and so on. 

 Thus his experience is forced, so to speak, to take a very wide range 

 in the quality and condition of cattle fed, and in the kind, condition 

 and quality of feed used. 



These considerations therefore would seem to justify us in giving 

 to the conclusions of these men the greatest weight. That is, the dif- 

 ference between two or more methods or practices, when large, may 

 be safely assumed to have already been discerned by the practical 

 man, by reason of his exceptional facilities for securing accurate data 

 already pointed out, and furthermore because of his capacity for close 

 observation and sound reasoning. (Mo. B. 76.) 



Advantages of Summer Over Winter Feeding. The advantages 

 of summer over winter feeding may be very^ briefly summarized as 

 follows: First, gains made in summer require less grain. Second, 

 the gains are made more rapidly, so that the animal is finished in less 

 time. Third, steers may be made thick and prime on corn and grass 

 in summer without the use of expensive supplementary feeds like 

 cottonseed meal or linseed meal, and will carry to market a lustrous 

 coat. It is impossible by the use of corn and such roughage as tim- 

 othy or prairie hay to bring animals within a reasonable time to any- 

 thing like the degree of fatness that may be easily made with corn 

 and grass, and they will never carry the bloom that is put on by full 

 feeding at pasture. Presumably the green grass contains sufficient 



