470 Suggestions for Stock-feeding in the Winter of 1893-94. 
shredded roots, with cake or meal, will be necessary for all graz- 
ing stock, but cart-horses, when hay is scarce, will do well upon 
the mixture if some oats or a few pulped roots are added. By 
far the greatest advantage the flockmaster can derive from 
silage is in the spring. When roots are scarce the dry pro- 
vender, upon which the ewes have often to subsist, is a poor 
milk-producing diet. It is then that the moisture of the silage 
affords the greatest benefits, for its addition to the dry chaff 
stimulates the flow of milk, without any drawback or danger 
whatever to dam or offspring. 
It has been a beautiful season in the Eastern Counties for 
harvesting our scanty corn crops. Most of the spring cereals have 
a large quantity of green ears, and consequently the straw should 
prove unusually nutritious. In fact, some oat straw is so green 
that it ought to be quite as good as ordinary hay, and every 
pound of it should be carefully preserved for fodder. Where 
cattle are grazed this winter in large open yards, they must be 
content with a somewhat dirty bed in the sheds, for only the 
roughest litter can be spared for the yards, and even in stalls, 
boxes, and covered yards the bedding must be used most 
sparingly. 
The threatened famine of winter provender will surely 
revive the old controversy as to the best mode of giving roots 
to stock. In my young days all sheep had to break their own 
turnips, and the cattle had their roots thickly sliced or chopped 
in rough pieces with a hook. Since then roots have been cut 
into fingers, shredded, or pulped, and yet one of the best 
Norfolk graziers, at the end of his successful farming days, 
threw aside all his machines and gave the roots whole to his 
bullocks. His idea was that by breaking and gnawing whole 
roots a larger quantity of saliva was produced and digestion 
was thus assisted ; whereas cattle are too apt to bolt a pulped 
mass without giving it the necessary mastication. In many 
districts this winter there will be hardly any roots for the 
horned stock, and even whei’e they are plentiful it will be 
necessary to make the very most of them. So the wasteful 
plan of allowing grazing bullocks to eat as many turnips as 
they please will hardly find an advocate, even in that fruitful 
Goshen of our root-crops — North-East Norfolk. 
There was a rage a few years ago for giving all stock cooked 
food. But it never became general, for although it is quite 
true that giving frozen turnips one day and sloppy dirty roots 
the next is not the way to make grazing pay, it is equally 
certain that to give hot food at noon and cool at night is no 
great improvement upon the ordinary modes of feeding. The. ' 
