65 



and economically he will gain, is not well founded. Neither is 

 the notion held by the same men that a nutritious, palatable, and 

 somewhat laxative hay, like clover, alfalfa, cowpeas, or flax 

 straw, is injurious rather than beneficial to cattle on full feed, 

 on account of its tendency to scour and because of the inclina- 

 tion of the animal to eat such large quantities of it that they 

 will consume too little grain to make rapid and cheap gains. 

 It is their idea that such coarse fodders as prairie hay, timothy, 

 corn stover, wheat straw or oat straw possess the qualities best 

 suited to the purposes of full feeding animals because they 

 are so low in palatability that there is no danger of the steer 

 eating too much and because of their slight tendency to produce 

 costiveness in the animal and thus enable even a limited quantity 

 of roughage to hold the grain in the digestive tract the required 

 length of time. 



A Large Roughness Consumption Does Not Necessarily Cause a 

 Diminished Grain Consumption. 



All of our experiments with different kinds of hays and 

 coarse fodders show that a large consumption of roughage is not 

 necessarily connected with a diminished grain consumption. 

 In other words, steers eating a legume hay like clover, cowpeas 

 or alfalfa will invariably consume not only more roughness than 

 similar steers eating timothy, for example, but materially more 

 grain as well. For example, in the first trial quoted, the total 

 consumption of grain per lot was 166 bushels when combined 

 with timothy and 188 bushels for a similar lot of cattle when 

 eating cowpea hay. 



In the second trial, the timothy lot consumed 157 bushels of 

 corn during the experiment, while the clover lot consumed i76 

 bushels, and the cowpea lot 175 bushels. The cattle had all of 

 the shelled corn they would eat in each case. . 



It will be noted that in the second trial the clover and 

 cowpea steers ate almost twice as much roughness as did the 

 timothy steers, notwithstanding their larger consumption of 

 grain. 



It will be interesting to note the effect of all of this upon 

 'the economy of production, as shown in the foregoing table of 



5 



