150 
Straw as Food for Stock. 
to the great advantage of their stock, their manure-heaps, their 
grain crops, and their own ultimate prosperity. 
But here I am met with a question which is put very plainly 
by one of my correspondents, namely, Mr. C. Beaven, who says, 
" You could undoubtedly feed more grass-land, but I do not 
advocate entirely doing away with haymaking to depend on 
straw, as in case of bad harvest-weather, with straw damaged,, 
and, in some cases almost rotten, what would you do?" Taking 
the average of years, there are many more wet hay harvests 
than grain harvests, the weather, as a rule, being finer and 
more settled in August and the early part of September than 
in June and July. In bad seasons for stacking corn they have, 
too, in some districts, a mode of putting the sheaves into wind- 
ricks, which, if more generally adopted, would prevent both the 
grain and the straw from being completely spoilt. Then, 
again, badly taken fodder, whether hay or straw, is often only 
unpalatable to stock because of a " must " or " fustiness," which 
steaming or even a slight fermentation is calculated to remove. 
I have seen hay which was absolutely white with must, come 
out of the hopper, after being chaffed and steamed, with a 
fragrant aroma which caused it to be eaten with avidity by 
fattening-stock. Farmers in general are tolerably sure in the 
worst seasons to have some straw they can utilise for fodder 
without diffieulty, and they would not risk much by placing less 
dependence on hay ; although there is, of course, this to be 
considered, that he who has two strings to his bow may possibly 
be able to use one should a mishap occur to the other. 
As the results of chemical analysis, Dr. Voelcker has placed 
the nutritive values of different sorts of straw in the following 
order: — 1. Pea-straw; 2. Oat-straw; 3. Bean-straw with the 
pods ; 4. Barley-straw ; 5. Wheat-straw ; 6. Bean-straw with- 
out the pods. The testimony of practical farmers has pretty 
generally endorsed this classification. Pea-straw has always 
been considered too valuable to be used as litter, and it gene- 
rally falls to the lot of sheep, those animals being particularly 
fond of it. Nearly all my correspondents set a higher value 
on oat-straw than on any other white straw for feeding pur- 
poses. There is less unanimity with regard to the virtue 
of barley-straw, attributable, no doubt, to the fact that its 
feeding value is not unfrequently materially increased by the 
large quantities of young clover mown with it. When there 
is little of this it very often sinks below wheat-straw in the 
scale of value, owing to the usual and almost invariable prac- 
tice of over-ripening the barley crop. The custom of doing 
this cannot, of course, be argued against, as the grain is im- 
