Feeding Dairy (battle 



Tailliy, Jr., Mr. C. L. Allen and Mr. James Beiermeister have 

 been the 3-oung men who have carried out Professor Wing's 

 directions for longer periods of time than anv others and in 

 his article, Air. Allen has given us a very careful statement of 

 good practices. Mr. Allen's article follow^s : 



"The making of large records of production is looked 

 upon by many persons as an art of manipulating the animal 

 v\rhich can be attained only by a very fevi^ men. This is true 

 just in so far as it is true that it is an art for a mechanic to 

 turn out a maximum amount of w^ork by skillful manipula- 

 tion of a delicate machine. On the other hand a man who 

 is a careful observer, a good caretaker, and who has had 

 sufificient practice, should be able to obtain good results. In 

 order to make high records the most skillful feeder must have 

 good cows with which to work and a good selection of 

 superior feed for their consumption." 



FITTING cows FOR TEST 



The uni\ersal practice in preparation for short time rec- 

 ords and a quite general practice in preparation for long- 

 time records is to fit the cows for the test. B\' fitting is 

 meant the conditioning of the animal by rest and fattening 

 so that she will be able to produce at a maximum by using 

 her stored up energy for milk production. Another aim is 

 to haA-e the cow strong and healthy at calving time. In mak- 

 ing short-time records it is customary to have the animal 

 very fat. It is expected that fat cows will for a short time 

 test higher than cows thin in flesh and thus make a higher 

 butterfat record. Perhaps half of the. animals fail to respond 

 to this treatment, however. In any case fitting seems to aid 

 production and high producers usually tend to become thin 

 in flesh soon after they begin their lactation period. Thus 

 it would seem that fitting aids the long-time record as well 

 as the short-time record although probably to a lesser extent. 



In fitting, the cows are usually dried of¥ three or four 

 months before cahing and are fed a very liberal ration. 

 The ration should consist of some good grain mixture 

 together with pasture or hay and silage. It is quite common 

 to feed a small amount of beet pulp also. Three to four 

 pounds of dry beet pulp moistened with three to four times 

 its weight of water would be a usual amount. The beet 

 pulp 'helps to keep the cows in a laxative and generally good 

 condition. Beets are just as valuable for this purpose but 

 thev are rarely fed because few men have a very large quan- 

 tity of beets and they would rather feed them when the cows 

 are on test. 

 Page Sixty-one 



