The Early Fattening of Cattle and Sheep. 
59 
parts of the country, from small farmers and cottagers. A north- 
country farmer said to me once, " I get some thumping calves 
from my labourers/' It is very much to be regretted that in all 
grass districts labourers and their wives do not understand 
dairying, so that cows and <; thumping calves" might become 
more common among them. The safest plan is to breed at 
home, and, in fact, one of the great advantages of early fattening 
is that the shortened process and the artificial method admit 
of its adoption in neighbourhoods where breeding was till lately 
disregarded. 
Among many farms that I have visited, where early fatten- 
ing is practised, besides those noticed in a former article, 1 is 
that of Mr. Edwin Ellis of Shalford, Guildford. Mr. Ellis 
begins with a good calf — long, broad over the loins, with a deep 
chest and full eye. He breeds some, and buys many of dealers 
who bring them to Guildford from the western dairy districts. 
They are " pailed " at once with new milk, diluted when the 
supply is short, in which case a little linseed-cake meal is stirred 
in. The best linseed cake, not too hard pressed, is alone used. 
The calves soon learn to chew a piece of sweet meadow hay, and 
lick up a little oatmeal, and afterwai'ds take some sliced roots, 
which must on no account be frosted. Calves weaned after 
June are finished without leaving their stalls or boxes. Those 
weaned earlier run in the paddocks in summer, except at 
night, or during rain or hot sunshine, when they are carefully 
sheltered. Their diet is varied. From May to October they are 
fed on green food of all descriptions, cut, and brought to the 
stalls — trifolium, spring cabbage, tares, autumn cabbage, and 
aftermath clover. Hardly any litter is required in the summer 
months, when the cattle do very well on the bare floor, witli 
hedge-trimmings or other rubbish to lie on. The dry food 
given to them consists of cake, oatmeal, barley-meal, and, if 
roots fail, they eat an additional quantity of chaffed straw and 
hay, as well as corn, good sweet barley straw being preferred to 
secondary hay. A little treacle is added to the chaff. Mr. 
Ellis has sometimes fattened his young bullocks up to 120 stone, 
and they have not eaten more than lb. of cake, with meal, 
daily ; while Irish steers that had been let down in condition, 
have eaten 8 lb. of cake daily. He thinks that ten bullocks of 
that sort have eaten twice as much food as twenty young 
bullocks, sixteen months old, that were treated on the early- 
fattening system. 
It is not easy to teach the management of cattle in an article, 
1 " Early Fattening of Cattle," Journal, Vol. XIV., Seoonct Series, p. 152. 
