404 AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. [Jan. 



steers, lambs and pigs, as may have been noticed in our 

 periodical reports ; others are at present on trial. 



Commercial feed stuffs are usually bought for their high 

 percentage of either nitrogen-containing organic matter or 

 tat, or both. They are used to enrich the daily diet of 

 various kinds of farm live stock in both directions. This 

 course is generally adopted on account of a well-known 

 deficiency of most of our home-raised coarse fodder articles 

 in regard to both food constituents, in particular, of nitroge- 

 nous matter. Farmers that do not raise a liberal proportion 

 of clover-like fodder plants are in a particular degree in need 

 of concentrated commercial feed stuffs rich in nitrogenous 

 food constituents to turn the excess of the non-nitrogenous 

 food constituents which most of our current home-raised 

 coarse fodder articles contain to the best possible account. 



The liability of pecuniary losses on the part of the buyer, 

 in consequence of exceptional variations in the percentage of 

 nitrogenous organic unatter, crude protein or fat, or of both, 

 is quite frequently greatly aggravated hy most unexpected 

 serious fluctuations in the marhet cost of leading feed stuffs. 



As we buy in the majority of cases the concentrated com- 

 mercial feed stuffs on account of their large proportion of 

 nitrogen-containing food constituents, it becomes of special 

 interest to know at what cost a given quantity of nitrogen- 

 containing food constituents can be bought in the form of dif- 

 ferent feed stuffs equally well adapted under existing cir- 

 cumstances. A change in the market cost of one and the 

 same commercial feed stuff affects the cost of the nitrogen- 

 containing food constituent in particular, as its su[)ply is 

 more limited than that of the non-nitrogenous food constit- 

 uents which our home-raised coarse fodder articles contain, 

 as a rule, in abundance, and which, therefore, need not be 

 secured from outside resources for cash. 



The subsc((uent tabular statement assumes a constant cost 

 of digestible non-nitrogenous food constituents, — sugar, 

 starch, fat, etc., — and shows thereby the variations in the 

 cost of digestible nitrogen-containing food constituents in 

 case of some prominent concentrated commercial feed stuffs 

 in our local mai'ket. 



