28 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION 



combined as to make possible the greatest growth, the dairy- 

 cows are coming in from pasture thinner and thinner as 

 each day goes by, until by fall when barn feeding starts 

 they are in such poor flesh that it requires two or three 

 months of heavy feeding to get them back to anywhere near 

 normal. 



A dairy cow should never be allowed to become ema- 

 ciated, and yet on half the dairy farms the cows are mere 

 shadows of what they should be by the time fall comes and 

 they are put into the barn for winter feeding. 



There Must Be Feed in the Pasture. 



The reason for this poor feeding in summer is that it is 

 with a sense of relief that men turn cows on pasture during 

 the busy cropping season of the year. They have thought 

 that when cows were on pasture they were well fed and 

 gave little time to the consideration of whether the cows' 

 needs were really supplied. 



Each year it is the same story. The inevitable drouth 

 comes and bluegrass fails, leaving the cows without feed, 

 and yet bluegrass still remains the chief pasture crop in the 

 dairy districts. The farmer can easily see the difference 

 between a 25 and 50 bushel yield of corn, but the failure of 

 bluegrass he does not seem to realize or else he takes it for 

 granted and does not try to remedy the situation. 



Need a Real Pasture Crap. 



What is needed in the cornbelt is a real pasture crop — 

 one that will withstand the drouth so that it can produce an 

 abundance of feed throughout the growing season. Blue- 

 grass fails absolutely to "fill the bilP in this respect. It is 

 not drouth-resistant and dries up after 6 or 8 weeks in the 

 spring, producing little or nothing until fall when, under 

 favorable conditions, it may furnish some pasture. 



In the face of such failure on the part of our most com- 

 mon pasture crop, and the realization that good pasture is 

 the cheapest feed he can produce, the dairyman naturally 

 asks whether there is not some other crop which he may 



