20 MAINE AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. I9OI. 



corn, etc. The feeding value of them is variable, and they 

 should never be bought except on a guaranteed composition, and 

 then it should be remembered that the oat hulls are not as digesti- 

 ble as the kernel of oats or other grains. Unscrupulous dealers 

 frequently sell "oat feeds" as ground oats, the unsuspecting 

 buyer thinking he is getting the whole oat meal, which is much 

 more valuable than most oat feeds. 



Very few farmers can afford to buy feeds low in protein and 

 high in carbohydrates at any price at which they have been or 

 are likely to be offered. The farmer should grow all the coarse 

 feeds that he needs. Oat and similar feeds are very much like 

 corn stalks or oat straw in composition. Some of the feeds have 

 cottonseed or other nitrogenous feeding stuffs added to them so 

 that they earn- more protein than straight oat feeds, but these 

 mixtures are always more expensive sources of protein than are 

 the glutens, cottonseed and linseed meals. One hundred pounds 

 of an ordinary oat feed has from eight to eleven pounds protein. 

 At seventy-five cents per hundred the protein costs from seven 

 to nine cents a pound. One hundred pounds of a good gluten 

 meal has from thirty-four to forty per cent of protein. At $1.30 

 per hundred the protein costs about three cents a pound and it 

 not only costs less than half as much as that of the oat feed but 

 it is better digested. 



The tables which follow give the analyses of oat hays cut at 

 different stages of growth, of different parts of the oat plant, 

 of oat and pea and oat and vetch hays, and oats and oat products 

 used in digestion experiments from which the digestion coeffi- 

 cients in the table on page 23 were obtained. 



