On increasing our Supplies of Animal Food. 



363 



Many, perhaps most, sheep and cattle are fed and fattened on 

 grass alone or on turnips and other green food, with at best a 

 little hay. In Scotland, where a turnip is a very different thing 

 from that which it is in England, cattle may be, and to some 

 extent are, fattened on turnips and straw. In England and in 

 Scotland too, however, it is now more generally the custom to use 

 oil-cake and other nutritive food in the process. In Lincolnshire 

 large quantities of this linseed-cake are consumed every winter in 

 the straw-yards: and the farmer is repaid for his outlay in this 

 respect by the production of a large quantity of valuable manure. 

 Of course the value of this manure as a fertiliser depends upon 

 the quality of the food from which it is made, as well as on that of 

 the other products of its consumption ; oil-cake minus the growth 

 of a growing animal, which is its manure in such a case, is a 

 much better thing than mere straw minus the same, which would 

 be the manure of a young animal fed on straw alone. The 

 former contains various nitrogenous and mineral substances use- 

 ful as food for plants, of which the latter is almost destitute. 

 And so, by the way, is the manure made by a fattening animal 

 better than that made by a growing one feeding on the same 

 food ; just, indeed, in the proportion in which the mere extraction 

 of fat, which is nearly all the growth in the one case, would leave 

 a better remainder than the subtraction of flesh and bones from 

 the food, which is the growth, in the other. But this is a di- 

 gression. 



More lately the eyes of farmers have opened to the real compo- 

 sition of the oil-cake, as it is purchased either from home or foreign 

 makers. It is found in many cases to be very much adulterated 

 with all sorts of seed and rubbish : and, in good measure owing to 

 the exertions of Mr. Warnes, of Trimmingham, in Norfolk, the 

 method has latterly prevailed of giving animals whole linseed (not 

 the mere husk, which is all that oil-cake at its best contains), and 

 along with it of adding to the straw chaff in which it is conveyed 

 to the animals, some farinaceous substance, as Indian corn, barley 

 or bean meal. The question whether it is profitable thus to con- 

 sume these concentrated sorts of food in feeding stock, depends 

 altogether on the kind of animals that are fed. A sheep or ox 

 which will not waste its food either m growing offal or in tedious 

 growth, will convert that profitably which on an animal of coarser 

 build and less thriftv growth would be thrown away. The latter 

 would lose more of their food than the advantage of the propor- 

 tion they managed to assimilate would repay ; and thus the only- 

 question to determine is, what degree of nutritiveness is it most 

 profitable to confer on the food given ? The use of this better 

 food is perfectly economical even with a poor stock, provided it 

 be used only to raise what of the farm produce may be below the 



