52 



confident of financial success. He singes off the thorns with a flame, and cuts up the 

 pear and feeds it mixed in troughs with the cotton-seed meal in the proportion of 

 about 5 pouuds of meal to 70 pounds of pear. The steers eat this food with great 

 relish, and take the food rapidly. They have about a 2,500-acre field to run in. If 

 this method of feeding proves a success, it may work quite a revolution in this sec- 

 tion, as thousands of tons of cotton seed are exported annually to England, and the 

 supply of the pear is simply inexhaustible. The feeding of the pear need in no way 

 diminish the supply, as, whenever a piece of leaf is left on the ground, it takes root 

 and makes another plant, growing rapidly. Corn is always high, and can never be 

 transported here for stock feed, and the stock shipped back again, over the same road, 

 with a eertainty of profit. The utilizing of Prickly Pear and cotton-seed meal will 

 make beef raising, as well as breeding, profitable in this portion of the country, and 

 make the ranchmen entirely independent of all other sections. 



Dr. Carothers, above mentioned, writes, March, 1887 : 



In pursuance of a correspondence had with your Department last summer, begun 

 by Mr. A. J. Dull, of Harrisburg, Pa., who has cattle interests in this State, I have 

 fed 400 beeves, and am now feeding 800 more on this food. From the analysis fur- 

 nished by Mr. Richardson, of your Department, I found that the Cactus was deficient 

 in albuminoids, and from the well-known richness of the cotton-seed oil cakes in 

 these elements, I selected it to supply the deficiency, which it did very well. At first 

 I burned the thorns off the Cactus, then cut it up by a machine which I devised, and 

 spread it in large troughs, scattering the cotton-seed meal over it when the cattle ate 

 it with great avidity. I soon found, however, that the burning was injurious, as it 

 was impossible to conduct it without cooking the Cactus to a greater or less extent, 

 which caused purging in the animals. To remedy this, i. e., to destroy the thorns 

 without scorching, I took advantage of the botanical fact that the thorns of Opuntia 

 Englemanni, the only one I use, are set at an angle of about 60° backward to the 

 plane of the leaf, and that a cut of half inch in width would strike every one of them. 

 I therefore set the knives of my machine to a half-inch cut, and find that when cut iu 

 this manner cattle eat it fully as well as when scorched, with none of the unpleasant 

 results referred to. I feed per head about 60 pounds of the Cactus, and an average 

 of about 6 pounds of the meal per day for ninety days. A train load of 330 head 

 of these cattle sold last week in Chicago at 4£ cents. The meat is singularly juicy 

 and tender, the fat well distributed among the muscles. I have sold it at 1 cent per 

 pound gross over grass cattle in San Antonio. 



John C. Chesley, Hamilton, Hamilton County, Central Texas : 

 The Prickly Pear is used here to a great extent. We have a ranch in Stephen s 

 County where we are now feeding the pear to over a hundred of our poorest cattle, and 

 they are doing well on it. . It is fed at nearly all of the ranches of Stephens County, 

 where they are feeding at all, and there are thousands of cattle being fed this winter 

 on Prickly Pear that are doing well and will come to grass in good shape that other- 

 wise would have died, or at least the larger part of them. 



The pear should be cut and hauled to the feed-lots while the sap is in the roots, or 

 before the warm days come, for if it is fed when the sap is in the tops it is liable to 

 cause laxness and weaken the animals. We prepare it for feeding by holding for a 

 moment over a blaze. I believe that in the southern part of the State they have a 

 burner with which they burn off the prickles, without cutting the plants from the 

 ground, aud then let the cattle eat them as they please, but we prefer to cut and feed 

 as above stated. One good man can prepare the Cactus and feed about 100 head of 

 cattle in this way. A poor or half-starved animal should be fed only a small quantity 

 at first, which may be gradually increased until the animal is allowed to eat all it 

 wants. When fed in this manner to range cattle, we have never known any injurious 

 results. But if it is fed to steers, and they are worked immediately afterwards, even 

 if the feed is small, and they are accustomed to it, they are liable to swell up. We 



