S4 -ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



individual conditions and surroundings; each farmer has his 

 own peculiar conditions and he must plan his ration himself, 

 but he must always make the principal part of it that feed 

 stuff which in his locality is the cheapest. In Minnesota the 

 first thing we do is to find out how much bran we can get 

 inside of a cow. We figure that it is about eight pounds, 

 the maximum. Then we add four pounds of barley and one 

 pound of oil meal and that balances the ration, gives just 

 enough heat-producing material to keep the body warm, and 

 enough protein to give a large daily yield of milk and also 

 replace the waste tissues in the body. In the corn belt we 

 w^ould first have to take a ration of corn and ascertain how 

 much we could give a dairy cow per day and yet add enough 

 of the other feed stuffs to balance the ration. It would seem, 

 perhaps, that it would not make any difference whether we 

 fed all corn or not, so long as a cow gave a good flow of milk, 

 but that really is not so. If you will stop to figure you will 

 find that you can only feed about six or possibly eight pounds 

 of corn per day, and the other part of the ration will have to 

 be composed of food stuffs that are high in nitrogenous 

 elements. If we have clover hay we can make a fair ration 

 with about eight pounds of corn, about four pounds of oats 

 and clover hay, but if you have timothy, or, indeed, any other 

 kind of hay, except clover, it is very difficult to make a bal- 

 anced ration without resorting to pea meal, oil meal or cotton- 

 seed meal. I presume in this State the cheapest food that 

 you have with which to balance a ration is cotton seed meal, 

 because it contains some thrity-two per cent, of digestible 

 protein. The cheapness with which rations can be com- 

 pounded under present conditions is certainly remarkable. 

 When I reached the point of 12 cents for a day's rations 1 

 thought I was getting down to about the bottom figure. 

 Things have changed materially since then, and, as you re- 

 member the figures of yesterday afternoon, the cost of board 

 for a cow ranges from 44 to 60 cents per week, showing that 

 a dairy ration runs somewhere from 5 to 7 cents per day. 

 This winter we have found that the cost of a ration is even 

 less than ever before and it is well that feed stuffs are lower, 

 for, if they were not, we certanly could not afford to produce 

 butter at the ruling prices. In stating the questions of the 



