138 Straw as Food for Stock. 
Analyses of Fresh and Stored Chaff. ' 
Fresh Cut. 
Stored 
Chaff. 
■ 
1G 
12 
12-01 
± 
£i 
t>i 
417 
Mucilage, sugar, ami digestible fibre .. 
QQ 
oo 
-J 
45-19 
oo 
31-iO 
7 
71 
7-53 
100 
00 
100-00 
The same tried in Boiling Water. 
16 
12 
12-01 
12 
S4 
22-89 
71 
04 
65-10 
100 
00 
100-00 
conducted by Dr. Voelcker, and for which I am indebted to 
Mr. F. M. Jonas, who says : — 
" One sample was taken just as it was first cut, the other after it had been 
fermented and stored for three or four months. The chaff was fermented with 
green rye, cut up at the same time." 
The period of cutting is, however, not the only circumstance 
which tends to determine the value of straw as food. The 
nature of the soil on which it is produced does this in a very 
material degree, and will often account for straw being employed 
more as fodder in one district than in another. Peat and 
alluvial soils naturally grow the stalks of plants very stout and 
coarse, and if the grain-crops are allowed to get only tolerably ripe 
before cut, very little of it would be fit for stock-feeding without 
maceration or steaming. Mr. George Angus on this point says : — 
" Your inquiries relative to the utilisation of straw for cattle-food would, I 
think, meet with only one reply from the farmers of Holderness. The straw 
grown in this district is, for the most part, so very coarse and dry, that it 
would never pay to try by chopping or steaming to transform it into any kind 
of compound likely to contain any feeding virtue. Upon the Yorkshire 
wolds, and where tbe harvest has been favourable, the straw is finer, and 
contains more nutriment certainly ; but considering the price of fuel, oil, 
machinery, and, most of all, manual labour, I do not at all believe that any 
margin of profit would remain, even when the best known processes of con- 
verting had been judiciously and carefully carried out. 
" I think if the finest part of wheat-, barley-, and oat-straw grown upon a 
farm, say to the extent of one-third, were chopped hy one of Kichmond and 
Chandler's Chaff-cutters, and then mixed at proper intervals (to avoid undue 
heating) with puljied turnips, a useful mixture, but not a fattening one, would 
Ikj obtained. 
