Straw as Food for Stock. 
143 
"Many of my neighbours grow a quantity of straw, ami have but few 
cattle, so that I am in the habit of filling their yards and boxes with cattle 
(say from thirty to forty every season). I give them 4 lbs. to 5 lbs. linseed- 
cake (best) each per day, per head, and that is considered equivalent to the 
value of the straw and the expense of serving, and I find my cattle do well. 
The winter of 1876-7 being exceptional, I have been giving 2 lbs. per head 
per day of Indian corn or barley-meal in addition. 
This system of sending cattle for winter -keep into other 
people's strawyards is, of course, by no means a singular one. 
Some of our largest and best dairy districts have very little or 
no arable land attached to the farms, and it has always been 
more or less customary for the milch-cows, when dry in winter, 
to be sent out to straw-keep into other localities. But they used 
to be taken in at a small charge, about 2s. or 2s. Qd. per week 
per cow for straw and attendance. A far better method is now 
adopted rather extensively, very similar in details to the one 
described by Mr. Beaven. The dairy-farmer supplies cows and 
oilcake, the arable farmer straw, with yard-room and attend- 
ance ; no money passes between them, yet both find themselves 
profited by the change. It costs the farmer in oilcake about 
the same he used to pay for his straw-keep, and probably a little 
less, if cotton-cake be given ; but his animals keep the flesh 
on their bones, and come home to calve in excellent thrift, to 
yield milk far more abundantly than they used to do the first 
quarter. The owner of the strawyard realises a good return in 
more valuable farmyard-manure, which used to be poor stuff 
indeed when the cows were fed on nothing but straw. As, how- 
ever, in backward districts the old system is still much more 
generally practised than this reformed modern one, the advan- 
tages and gains of the latter can scarcely be too prominently 
held up to view. 
According to Mr. Edmund Rich, there is a tolerably large 
consumption of straw as fodder in Gloucesterhire. He says : — 
" Oat-straw is almost invariably given in the winter time to dairy cows 
when dry, also to two-year-old beasts and working oxen when out of work, to 
eat the best parts of it. The same may be said of good barley-straw ; but pro- 
bably at least half of the bulk remains for litter. Pea-straw is used in the same 
manner. Wheat-straw is but little used for fodder, except to cut into chaff for 
horses. Occasionally, but not often, straw-chaff is given to sheep with artificial 
food. Straw is employed, entirely uncooked ; but it is occasionally given with 
pulped roots. Young beasts, as also other poor cattle, are often almost entirely 
kept on straw in the winter time. I do not think that straw could be more 
extensively used profitably in this neighbourhood than it is at present by the 
great majority of farmers." 
Mr. C. Randell, of Chadbury, Evesham, who won the Wor- 
cestershire Agricultural Society's first prize last year, for having 
the best managed farm in that county, and whose advanced 
farming practices have, on several previous occasions, been 
