150 Feeds and Feeding. 



187. Cotton-seed cake and meal. — At the oil mills the dry, leath- 

 ery hulls of the cotton seed, which are covered with short lint, are 

 cut by machinery, and the oily kernels set free. These kernels are 

 crushed, heated, placed between cloths, and subjected to hydraulic 

 pressure in order to remove the oil. The residue is a hard, yellowish, 

 boardlike cake about 1 inch thick, 1 ft. wide, and 2 ft. long. In 

 this form it is shipped abroad as cotton-seed cake. For home trade 

 the cake is reduced to meal by grinding, the product being called 

 cotton-seed meal. Cotton seed is high in crude protein and fat, and 

 cotton-seed meal is one of the richest in these nutrients of all feeds. 

 The decorticated cotton-seed cake of the European markets is sim- 

 ilar in composition to American cotton-seed meal. The undecorti- 

 cated cake contains more hulls, and has a proportionally lower feed- 

 ing value. 



Cold-pressed cotton-seed cake is produced by subjecting the en- 

 tire uncrushed, unheated seed to great pressure. In the residual 

 cake there is a larger proportion of hull to meal than in normal 

 cake, with correspondingly lower feeding value. In a trial with 

 dairy cows Lee and Woodward of the Louisiana Station^ found 

 cold-pressed cotton-seed cake less valuable for milk and butter pro- 

 duction than an equal weight of a mixture of two parts of meal and 

 one of hulls. They conclude that the chemical composition of cold- 

 pressed cotton-seed cake is a reliable indication of its feeding value. 

 With cotton-seed meal at $30 per ton and hulls at $5 they estimate 

 that cold-pressed cotton-seed cake is worth $21,65 per ton. 



188. Feeding cotton seed. — Some cotton seed is still used in the 

 South for feeding steers and dairy cows, tho most of it is now used 

 for oil production. Trials at the Texas Station- showed that seed 

 at $12 per ton was cheaper for fattening steers than meal at $20. 

 Marshal and Burns of the same Station' secured larger daily and 

 total gains with cotton seed than with cotton-seed meal. (535) Cou- 

 ncil and Carson, likewise of the same Station,* found that boiled or 

 roasted seed produced larger tho more expensive gains than raw 

 seed, and was more palatable and less laxative. 



189. Cotton-seed meal for horses. — Gebek^ reports that draft 

 horses do well on a ration containing 2 lbs. of cotton-seed meal. 

 Judge Henry C. Hammond, Augusta, Georgia,^ reports that for 

 years he has fed about 1 lb. of cotton-seed meal daily to colts, brood 



1 Bui. 110. ^ Bui. 97. 'Loc. cit. " Bui. 27. = Landw. Vers. ISta., 42, p. 294. 



' Cotton-seed Meal as a Horse and Mule Feed; also, private correspondence. 



