DAIRY PRODUCTS. 211 



BARNSTABLE. 



From the Report oj the Committee. 



The products of the present year were equal in quality and 

 quantity to that exhibited in past years. Perhaps we may 

 say that in quality it was in advance of preceding years. But 

 there is much yet for the farmer to do to get the most butter 

 from any given number of pounds of hay. The great desider- 

 atum is to turn the least amount of grass into the greatest 

 amount of gold. This can only be done by great care and 

 exact knowledge. The best way, too, is not always the most 

 costly. Perhaps, on the first start, a small outlay may be 

 required, but in the end it will pay many fold. The making of 

 good butter and of a large amount from a single cow, or from 

 a herd, is not the easiest thing imaginable. The feeding of the 

 cows, the milking of them, the carrying of the milk, even, the 

 setting- of the milk, the time and manner of skimming, the 

 temperature of the dairy, the churning, the washing of the 

 butter, and the packing for winter can all be done well by 

 the careful, tidy dairy-woman, or ill by the slatternly sloven. 

 In fact there is not a single detail of the whole process of turn- 

 ing milk into butter and cheese that cannot be so done as to be 

 profitable to the husbandman, or so done as to waste his labor 

 and capital. 



Feeding the Coivs. 

 With poor feed, — with salt hay or black grass alone, — the best 

 cow will produce miserable milk, and worse butter. She should 

 be fed on food that will make her thrive. You could feed a 

 cow, and perhaps keep life in her, so that she would not average 

 a pint of milk a day, and so lose your feed and your labor, just 

 as you might feed a hog so that he would not grow a pound in 

 the whole year, and thus lose all the corn you had given him. 

 To be sure, we cannot lay down an exact rule of feeding, 

 because some farms produce different crops from others ; but 

 we will take the liberty to suggest how one of the greatest 

 dairymen of the United States feeds his herd, who grows regu- 

 larly rich in the operation. His plan was to give each cow two 

 quarts a day of mixed provender, consisting of one-third each 

 of corn, oats and buckwheat, ground together, with hay up to 



