No. 4.J FEEDING OF DAIRY COWS. 131 



I will not follow that point further. The skin is a most 

 important organ, and its outside condition has much to do 

 with the profit derived from the feed the covv^ swallows. 

 This treatment of the skin also has an effect upon the con- 

 dition of young calves. 



Of course many of these things you know already, but 

 some of you may not know that when a cow swallows 

 bulky, coarse food, it goes into her first stomach, and then 

 goes back into her mouth to be chewed as her cud. I dare 

 say that plenty of men who make their living from feeding 

 cows have spent hours on a box in a grocery store, discuss- 

 ing politics, to one minute they have spent in watching and 

 studying a cow as she feeds. It pays men best to look after 

 their own business first, and make the country prosperous 

 through their own prosperity ; thus they help on the general 

 prosperity of the comnumity. A man cannot feed a cow 

 properly unless he sometimes watches her eat, and chew her 

 cud. A man who feeds a cow without an intelligent under- 

 standing of her digestive capacity, sees no meaning in rumi- 

 nation, — rumen being the name of the cow's first stomach. 

 The point I want to make now is, that the cow floats the 

 coarse food back into her mouth, and if you watch her you 

 will see her swallow the water by squeezing it out of the 

 cud. Then she will chew the cud forty, fifty or sixty times, 

 according to the nature of the food she swallowed, and then 

 send it on into the third and fourth stomachs for digestion, 

 and thence on through the bowels. Now, if a cow gets any 

 kind of food that goes into the third and fourth stomachs 

 without going through the first stomach and being re-chewed, 

 she cannot very well digest that food properly. The 

 process of rumination is necessary for complete digestion. 

 That is why I think all that a cow gets should be given 

 in such a form that it must necessarily go into her first 

 stomach. 



A cow should have succulent food and lots of water. 

 The stomach of a cow will hold about one hundred pounds 

 of water, to be there all the time as in a mash tub in which 

 she will soak the food herself in the best way. If a cow 

 does not have abundance of water to drink, she cannot pre- 

 pare her own food for digestion perfectly ; and one means of 



