23 



" Feeding Ch-ains Wet or Dry. It has generally been found that, in the 

 case of hogs, they will eat more of soaked grain than of dry, hence it is 

 advisable to soak grain for hogs. It is certainly wrong, however, to suppose 

 that grain is more nutritious after it has stood in water long enough to sour 

 and begin to rot. The question whether a cow's grain feed be dry or in the 

 form of a mash, seems not to be an important one, providing the cow is in 

 normal health. 



" Chopping Fodders and Grains. There can be no question but that, on 

 the whole, it pays to chop grain before feeding, at least for pigs and cows. 

 Oats are especially valuable for pigs and cows when well ground. In general, 

 when grains pass through animals undigested, it is better to chop, unless the 

 droppings of the animals are fully worked over by other animals. The 

 principal object of cutting up hay and fodder is to mix up the coarser, less 

 palatable portions with the rest, thus causing the food to be eaten up cleaner. 

 Long straw of any kind is wasted more or less by being thrown from the 

 rack. A good fodder cutter and a feed mill ought to form part of the 

 equipment of every extensive dairy farm. 



" Value as Fertilisers. The three ingredients that render manure valu- 

 able are nitrogen, potash, and phosphoric acid. Our farmers have not yet, as 

 a rule, learned the value of fertilisers ; they are content, for the most part, to 

 practise a system of cropping that robs the soil by slow degrees of the 

 elements that enable it to produce bountiful crops, all heedless of the absolute 

 certainty that in the near future this fertility must be restored to the soil at 

 great expense. It will be of some value to our more progressive farmers to 

 know how much fertilising material our feeding stuffs contain. 



" In those states in which fertilising materials must be purchased and 

 applied to the land annually, it is estimated that, in ordinary mineral fertil- 

 isers, as bought on the market, a pound of nitrogen costs on the average 

 about 12 cents; potash, 5 cents, and phosphoric acid 5 cents. Now we can 

 recover in the manure three-fourths to nine-tenths of the fertilising materials 

 in the food; it is easy to see, therefore, that those foods which are rich in 

 nitrogen also make the most valuable manure. 



" The following table gives the value of the manure made by feeding one 

 ton of each of the foods named, assuming that three-fourths of the fertilising 

 ingredients of the food are recovered in the manure, and attaining the values 

 above indicated to these fertilising materials : 



Value of Manure from One Ton of Food. 



Timothy hay $3 58 



Fodder corn 4 23 



Vetch hay 6 57 



Pea meal 6 90 



Red top hay 3 19 



Red clover hay 5 97 



Dry carrot tops 9 75 



Wheat bran 6 89 



Barley straw 4 00 



Alsike clover 6 39 



Orchard grass hay 4 08 



Linseed meal 12 00 



" These figures give a general idea of the value of the manure that may 

 be obtained from common feeding stuffs. By comparing the composition of 

 those given with others in the table giving the digestible ingredients of feed- 

 ing stuffs, a close approximation of the manurial value of any feeding stuff 

 there given may be made. 



