Sugar as a Food for Stock. 
85 
their weight than the starch, and what little there was is 
clearly due, not to the selection of sugar rather than starch, but 
to the rejection of the bran. Starch and sugar therefore, as 
foods, appear to be equivalent ; or, in other words, a pound of 
one, properly used, can produce no more increase in our stock 
than a pound of the other. 
If we turn from experiment to practice, it will be found that 
sugar does not possess the high feeding value which is some- 
times attributed to it. The greater portion of the dry substance 
of mangolds consists of sugar. At the Liverpool quotation 
the sugar alone in mangolds would make their feeding value 
175. per ton, which is a far higher estimate than most farmers 
would like to place upon them. Swedes are generally considered 
quite as good a food as mangolds, if not better, weight for 
weight ; and yet swedes contain less sugar than mangolds, and 
their consuming value is rarely estimated at more than 7s. or 8s. 
per ton. Sugar beet contains about 12 per cent, of sugar, which, 
at lis. per cwt., would make the sugar in a ton of beet worth 
27s., and yet some farmers in Suffolk were willing to sell their 
beet to the Lavenham Sugar Factory at 21s. per ton ; and this, 
though the beet-roots — in addition to the sugar — contained other 
valuable substances, such as nitrogen, potash, and phosphates. 
Granted that a somewhat exaggerated value has been placed 
on sugar as a food for stock, still there is no doubt that it is an 
excellent food : the only question therefore is this. At what price 
should a farmer buy sugar as compared with other foods in the 
market ? 
Athough we may not know what is the most healthy balance 
of the various constituents of food to be given to our stock in 
their various stages of growth and fattening, still there are cer- 
tain limits beyond which we may feel sure that food will be 
wasted. The pigs in my experiments, which were allowed to 
select what they pleased out of the four foods : — lentils, bran, 
sugar, and starch — consumed more of the highly nitrogenous 
lentils than the quantity which had been allotted to the pigs in 
the other experiments. 
The relation of the nitrogenous to the non-nitrogenous food 
in this experiment was higher than it is in barley. I think, 
therefore, we may safely conclude that sugar should not be used 
in any quantity with the cereal grains, or with maize, rice, roots, 
or even with meadow hay. All these substances are somewhat 
low in nitrogen, and to dilute the nitrogen that exists still more 
by the use of sugar would tend to waste it. On the other hand, 
the leguminous seeds, especially lentils, tares, and beans, and 
such foods as linseed-cake, cotton-cake, and clover-hay, contain a 
relatively large amount of nitrogenous substance, which might 
be safely diluted with sugar. 
