THIRTY-SIXTH ANNUAL CONVENTION. 75 



and does not give the milk a bad flavor is perfectly safe to feed 

 to the dairy cow. It is not the direct feed on the milk, the food 

 is converted into blood and the milk takes its nutriment from the 

 blood. It is that certain kinds of food have a bad effect on the 

 animal. If you feed decayed roots, naturally the milk cannot be 

 good for that kind of food does not agree with the animal. Of 

 course, there are certain kinds of foods and also weeds which 

 put flavor into the milk. Such foods as certain roots, for in- 

 stance, onions, also turnips tends to put a bitter and undesirable 

 flavor into milk, also certain weeds as chicory and many others. 

 If you want to produce milk of good flavor you must keep these 

 things form the cow. Silage very often, and I have heard a 

 great many discussions on the flavor of milk from cows that have 

 been fed silage, and Urbana has demonstrated conclusively that 

 while silage may add flavor and the public prefer milk from the 

 cows fed silage, yet sometimes the milk condensaries refuse to 

 rake milk from farms where they feed silage. This is ridiculous. 

 When silage was first put up they did not know how to puL it up 

 and the result was that much of the silage did not come out well 

 and did not have a good effect on the milk. They started con- 

 densed milk at that time and they are still where they were fifty 

 years ago, they still think silage is a bad thing, where, as a matter 

 of fact, you can make just as good condensed milk from silage 

 fed cows as you can from cows not fed on silage. 



It is an insult for any big company, as we know there are, 

 to prohibit the feeding of silage as long as silage is the most 

 economical and most satisfactory food we can feed to our co\v's. 



A word about the water : I do not know, and I do not know 

 as any one else knows, what the effect of bad water is on the 

 milk. It is natural or reasonable to say that good water has a 

 beter chance to produce good milk than unclean water. Now the 

 cow needs a great deal of water. Why? First of all because a 

 large portion of the milk is water, over four-fifths of all there is 

 in milk is water. Then again the cow is an immense machine, 

 doing a lot of work. 



Johanna will produce over 27,000 pounds of milk in tlie 

 year, — 1,000 pounds of butter fat in a year, what an immense 



