136 The Dawn of a New Constructive Era 



Rations That 



Double 



Profits 



High - Grade 

 Cows Pay 

 Best in the 

 End 



meal produced a profit of $51.75 from butter when sold at 30 

 cents a pound. When fed on a ration of 36 pounds of silage, 7 

 pounds of hay and 5 pounds of mixed grain, the profit at the same 

 sale price was $37.15. When fed on a ration of 12 pounds of 

 silage, 10 pounds of hay and 10 pounds of mixed grain, the profit 

 fell to $24.43. In other words, one ration was more than twice 

 as profitable as another. This example will apply with equal 

 force to the economic maintenance of horses and mules, beef and 

 dairy cattle, sheep and swine. The feeding of live stock may be 

 a gamble at present, and, if so, the cards stack themselves against 

 the owner every time. Intelligence and skill and the essential 

 knowledge on which correct nutrition is predicated must be pos- 

 sessed by the successful stockman. I emphasize, therefore, the 

 necessity of encouraging hundreds of boys in the South to take 

 the necessary courses of instruction in our agricultural colleges 

 that they may become acquainted with the science and art of an- 

 imal nutrition and becom« experts in the handling of live stock. 

 Until this is done our progress will be of the more or less blun- 

 dering variety and our losses will be so frequent as to discourage 

 rather than promote what in the very nature of the situation 

 should always be one of our most important and constructive in- 

 dustries. 



The stockman must give consideration to quality in his ani- 

 mals. If he is not willing to do this he cannot hope to succeed. 

 The South is very backward in this direction. We are securing a 

 very small return, for instance, from the dairy cows we maintain. 

 In fact, a large per cent of them are unprofitable. It may not 

 seem credible to every person, but it is true nevertheless that a 

 cow giving 300 pounds of butter fat in a lactation period made 

 the same profit as forty-one cows each yielding 131 pounds of 

 butter in a lactation period. The reason for this lies in the fact 

 that it costs so much to maintain an animal. The food consumed 

 in maintenance is not used for productive purposes. A cow of 

 limited assimilative capacity can only utilize so much food. We 

 may feed her more than a given amount but she wastes the bal- 

 ance. She is not an economical manufacturer of milk and butter. 

 We must get rid, therefore, of the thief in the dairy herd, and we 

 should remember that there are thousands of them. The same is 

 true of our beef cattle and our sheep and swine. We must get rid 

 of the scrub stock, the slow developer, and the animal which can 

 not eat an unusually large amount of food and assimilate and 



