484 Suggestions for Stock-feeding in the Winter of 1893-94. 
however, we can make many a good mixture, not only palatable, 
but life-sustaining and meat-producing. Not one straw fit for 
consumption, more than is absolutely necessary, ought to be 
wasted or used for bedding. Not that I advocate a neglected or 
scanty bed for the animals that we are compelled to house during 
the winter. This would, indeed, be false economy. When once 
cattle and young horses are taken from the pastures to sheltered 
yards a dry comfortable bed is a necessity. Every bit of 
rush, sedge, bracken, border grass, sprigs of young furze and 
heather, must be secured and reserved for litter ; while even the 
fallen leaves from trees will be a welcome addition to the stock 
of bedding stuff. 
Covered yards will, this winter, be more valuable than ever, 
but where tenants are not fortunate enough to possess them, 
a thick layer of sand, crag, or burnt clay, forming a dry 
bottom to the yard or box, will greatly economise the straw 
thrown down for bedding. I have found fresh-ploughed turf 
carted in the cattle-yard every three or four days a good substi- 
tute for straw ; but this is more difficult to obtain on any but 
light land farms, and on these sand or crag is about as good, 
and is always available. As a last resource, both cattle and colts 
will winter well on a dry pasture, provided it is sheltered some- 
what, and the fact recognised that there is no food on the pas- 
ture, and that therefore a sufficiency must be carried to them. A 
dry bottom is a great point. 
At Orford Ness, about as bleak a place as any on our Eastern 
coast, colts have wintered (in severe weather, too) on the marshes, 
simply divided from the sea by some quarter of a mile of bare 
shingle, with no shelter beyond what a score of animals could obtain 
from a small haystack, which they were allowed to pull at as they 
chose, and which, as winter wore on, gradually disappeared 
altogether. They received the same amount of additional food 
as they would have had in a covered yard at the homestead. 
Bedding, however, they neither had nor required, and this was 
the only saving. Yet, in the approaching winter of 1893-94, a 
saving such as this will prove of considerable importance. 
Young cattle on a sheltered pasture I have found to go 
through the winter equally well, and our young Red Polls have 
thus gained quite a rough Highland-looking coat ; but it should 
be remembered, and never forgotten, that they must he fed. 
The great mistake in this matter arises from the fact that the 
farmer is prone to think there is something to be got from the 
pasture, and therefore does not carry the animals a sufficiency of 
food, or an amount equal to what he would allow them at the 
homestead. 
