864 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
December 30 
possible to bring the butter. The churn should not 
be filled more than one-third full for practical work. 
When cream has been raised and kept as cool as A. 
R’s. probably is 62 degrees or 03 degrees will be a 
better temperature for churning in winter than 60 de¬ 
grees. When cows have been long in milk the cream is 
more difficult to churn, and to overcome the trouble I 
churn at a higher temperature, even as high as 68 de¬ 
grees sometimes. If this bring the butter too soft I 
cool down to 00 degrees or thereabouts, with ice just 
when the butter begins to come. I have very little 
faith in the necessity for ripening cream, for any ad¬ 
vantage in churning, either in time or quantity. I 
have tried scores of times with sweet cream and 
ripened cream, and I never found that one method 
brought butter quicker, or more of it than the other. I 
have been using a revolving churn seven or eight 
years and I never have had a mess of cream which 
failed to come to butter. The time depends much on 
the rapidity of motion. That rapidity which en¬ 
counters the greatest opposition will do the best work. 
Medway, Mass. M. m. 
Unripe Cream. —I think the trouble with A. R.’s 
cream is that it is not sufficiently ripened. After tak¬ 
ing it from the cellar and bringing it to the right tem¬ 
perature, 62 degrees, it should be kept in a warm at¬ 
mosphere until it becomes slightly acid before churn¬ 
ing. The sooner this is done the better to produce the 
best butter. In cold, deep setting of milk, except in 
warm weather, it takes a longer time to develop the 
butter element than in shallow setting. The trouble, 
I think, is not in the churn, but in the way of handling 
the cream. I have used the rectangular, revolving 
churn for 10 years, and think it unequaled. I would 
give up butter making it-1 were obliged to return to a 
dash churn. My butter always brings the top price in 
this section, or an average of 25 to 26 cents per pound. 
Crystal Springs, N. Y. A. s. 
The Butter Extractor gives fully as good satis¬ 
faction as ever. It pays for itself yearly. We run it 
about s’ven months in a year, but it is all right for the 
twelve. As we sell the skim-milk the year around, 
sweet, during the hottest weather, we skim with 
siphons, which saves mixing so large a quantity of 
milk, and the milk is less liable to sour. 
Manchester, N. H. w. e. prescott. 
Get one of those potatoes—coax a good yield out of 
it, and make some money. See editorial page. 
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FEEDING DAIRY COWS WITHOUT ENSILAGE. 
E. O. <$., Athens , Ohio .—I wish to get the experience 
of practical dairymen on the following points : I do 
not wish to feed ensilage. Our roughage is corn fodder 
and clover hay, our grain is cut corn and fodder and 
this season we are cutting with the above, unthrashed 
wheat. What feeds, and at what prices, can we profit¬ 
ably use with our cut corn and fodder estimating corn 
meal at $20 per ton ? Should the feed be given dry, 
or will it pay for the extra expense to scald with hot 
water, or should it all be cooked ? 
Cooking Is Inexpedient. 
Bright corn fodder and early-cut clover hay cut is 
the best of roughage for E. G. S.’s cows. Add to the 
above equal parts by weight of corn meal and wheat 
bran. Oats ground are the best of feed for a part of 
the grain ration, as are linseed and cotton-seed meal 
in small quantities. I would not feed corn unhusked 
or wheat unthrashed even after being cut, unless 
cooked, which is generally thought by dairymen to be 
inexpedient. h. g. h. 
Glens Falls, N. Y. 
The Value of Cotton-Seed Meal. 
E. G. S. has given rather scanty data to work upon. 
As I understand it, he is cutting up a portion of his 
corn without husking it. Probably the weight of 
intelligent testimony is that it would pay to husk and 
grind this corn before feeding it. Still, this would 
mean labor equal to one-quarter of its value and I am 
not certain that there would be as large a loss as this 
in feeding it whole. Some Kansas steer feeders say 
that they cannot afford to grind their corn. The same 
may be true of the untlirashed wheat. Unless he is 
feeding a large percentage of clover hay, his ration is 
quite too carbonaceous and, in any event, whatever 
grain food is added should contain plenty of protein. 
The most wonderful food in the world is cotton-seed 
meal and a couple of pounds per day of this, fed to 
each cow, will balance up what would otherwise be a 
very wide ration. We have fed it more or less for a 
dozen years past and it has perhaps given more 
decided results than any other food. But, as a gen¬ 
eral rule, two pounds per day are enough for a cow. 
It is constipating, the butter, where an excess of it is 
fed, is too hard and crumbly, and I am sure that a 
critical taste will detect a lacR of good flavor. 
Many good dairymen, among them, Prof Robertson 
of Canada (and this is our experience), find that a 
pound of grain per 100 pounds of live weight of animal 
is all that can profitably be fed to the dairy cow. as a 
general rule. So if E G S. finds that the corn and 
wheat in his ration amount to 10 pounds per cow, he 
will perhaps do well to feed only a little cotton-seed 
meal in addition. Under these conditions, it may be 
worth $30 per ton to him, although he should get it 
for considerably less than that. 
If he live in a buckwheat country, he may find bucK- 
wheat middlings his cheapest source of protein. These 
are worth $17 here and contain not far from 28 per 
cent of crude albuminoids according to the Wisconsin 
Experiment Station. Or he may be so circumstanced 
as to find some of the nitrogenous by-products of corn 
(germ meal, Buffalo feed, cream gluten, etc.) best and 
cheapest for him. 
In the light of our present knowledge, there is prob¬ 
ably very little doubt about the second part of the 
query. It certainly does not pay to cook either rough 
fodder or grain for ruminant anima's. The chemist 
and practical feeder have both found this out. Albu¬ 
minoids are rendered decidedly less valuable by cook¬ 
ing. But starch is made more digestible and some 
good feeders are still in favor of cooking grain for 
swine. Potatoes are greatly improved by cooking. In 
feeding, I would simply sprinkle a little water (per¬ 
haps a quart to each cow) on the cut fodder after it is 
in the manger ; dust on the ground feed and stir up 
slightly. JARED VAN WAGENER, JR. 
New York. 
“He Ought to Use Ensilage.” 
E G. S. says that he does not wish to feed ensilage. 
I wish that he did. He does not say that his patrons, 
or the c *eamery object to the use of ensilage, he just 
doesn’t want to feed it. I venture the opinion that, 
if he continue in the dairy business a few years he 
will come to rely, mainly, on ensilage 10 months of 
every 12. “ Our roughage is corn fodder and clover 
hay.” That’s good, good enough. “ Our grain is cut 
corn and fodder and unthrashed wheat.” Well, that’s 
butter on his sausage ; and, if no hogs follow his cows, 
must result in great waste. If his corn were in the 
Bilo, and the wheat thrashed, it would be profitable at 
present prices, to grind the wheat and mix it with the 
ensilage ration ; as it is, however, he should have hogs 
to glean the undigested grains of wheat and corn. 
“ What feeds, and at what prices, can we profitably 
use with our cut corn and fodder estimating corn meal 
at $20 per ton V ” I have lost faith in commercial con¬ 
centrated stock foods. Bran, adulterated with ground 
corn cobs, mixed with screenings, sweepings of iron 
dust and gravel, is unpalatable to stock, unprofitable 
to buy and positively dangerous to feed. In feeding 
my own herd I now confine myself to the products of 
my own farm, viz.: clover, corn fodder, corn ensilage 
with a grain ration of oat meal, and would add wheat 
meal were I so unfortunate as to have the wheat. 
“ Should the feed be given dry, or will it pay for the 
extra expense to scald with hot water, or should it be 
cooked ? ” It does not pay to scald or cook food for 
cows; better build a silo next summer and be happy. 
Illinois. p. H. MONROE. 
Cut Dry Stalks are Like Clothes Pins. 
For more than 25 years I stubbornly and persistently 
fed corn fodder to a large herd of dairy cows. I was 
born into the practice of feeding whole corn stalks 
out doors in the barnyard and orchard to manure the 
latter and not litter up the barn. But that old way 
doesn’t make dairy cows give milk ; neither will it 
put fat on steers. After my father died, I double 
lined my old open crack cow barn, and banked up the 
barn outside so that the cold wind could not whistle 
under my cows, and fixed it warm enough so that the 
manure would not freeze. I then bought me a good 
heavy Clipper corn-stalk cutter and went to work in 
dead earnest to cut corn stalks fast enough to feed 25 
head of dairy cows in the barns. After the first week, 
I discovered that the hired man could do that part of 
the business better than I could ; so from that very 
hour I let him do it. 
Tbe first winter I did not throw out of my cow 
mangers quite half of the old, dry corn stalk stubs, 
but I starved the old cows into eating some of them, 
and then let them out into the barnyard to drink ice 
water out of a large water trough, and hook each 
other for exercise. I supposed in those days that it 
was actually necessary for cows to have exercise out- 
of dcors in the open air to keep them healthy and make 
them give pure milk ; besides, we did not have so 
much manure to clean out of the stable. The cows 
did give twice as much milk, and more, under such 
humane treatment as before. But I wanted greater 
results, so I had a 30-bushel tight pine feed-box made; 
into this I put a plump bushel of cut stalks for each 
old cow, and sprinkled each six-inch layer with one 
gallon of hot water, putting in six layers for each 
feed. This was left in the feed-box 12 hours to soak 
soft, and get into a reasonable condition for cow masti¬ 
cation. The plan worked to a perfect charm for over 
20 years, but I could never hire the same man a second 
year ; he got enough of it in one year. But the old 
cows would never gb back on this ration for rough 
fodder. With this poor kind of ensilage, I fed corn 
meal and bran, equal parts by weight. The bran has 
about three times the bulk of an equal weight of clear 
corn meal, and the above mixture is an excellent 
milk-producing ration. 
The bran cost me from $12 to $15 per ton by the car¬ 
load, and my corn meal was worth $20 per ton. Ground 
oats and corn, equal parts by bulk, will make more 
milk than any other ground feed I ever fed to cattle, 
but it costs too much. Cotton-seed meal or linseed- 
oil-cake meal, at $24 per ton or more, costs too much 
for the production of milk. I have tried every one 
of these formulas thoroughly, and with scales and 
milk measures in the barn, knew exactly what I had 
done when I finished paying the cost of it each season, 
Corn stalks must be made soft and succulent or one 
might just as well feed wooden clothespins. I pity 
the man who has to feed whole dry cut corn with the 
kernels hard and glazed, and expects milk from such 
a ration He simply uses his old cow for a silo to con¬ 
vert his bbrd corn and wheat into a reasonably soft 
condition for hog feed, and he must hitch a hog to the 
hind leg of each old cow to eat up and utilize his 
grain. If he does not do this more than one-half the 
grain fed goes into the manure pile. Pork thus made 
is about the only profitable crop of the farm by this 
system. 
My feed ration has been three quarts of ground feed 
as above stated, corn meal and bran with each morn¬ 
ing and evening feed of moistened cut corn stalks, 
and a large noon feed of clover hay, together with 
three quarts of ground feed. I water my cows in the 
afternoon in the barn. I have water troughs in my 
feed mangers. For weeks at a time in winter they 
don’t go out of the barn. They never need out-door 
exercise, nor should they be out-doors when it is too 
cold for a man to loaf out there in his shirt sleeves. 
Give the cows exercise in the barn by vigorous use of 
the cattle card and brush on them once a day. The 
ration given above will cost from $15 to $20 per cow 
for each six months winter feed, but I can beat this 
with my modern wooden silos and the large Southern 
white corn ensilage, at a cost of less than $10 per 
head, and give a noon feed of the clover hay. If any 
farmer grows field corn for the grain, he should, by 
all means, have a silo and cut all his corn stalks on 
the farm when husking is over. In one short job be 
can make these hard, dry stalks, by the free use of 
water when filling the silo, into a good, warm, moist, 
succulent, milk-producing cattle food. 
Ohio. HENRY TALCOTT. 
Timothy Compared to a Mule. 
Having had no experience in feeding cut corn and 
fodder, or scalding feed. I can only answer the ques¬ 
tions theoretically. To say that good clover hay is 
the best roughage for cows is putting it too mildly. 
My experience is that for quantity, quality and color 
of butter, clover properly cured will beat corn fodder 
just as the trained trotter will beat a common roadster 
on the race track; and Timothy hay might be com¬ 
pared to the mule. It would require a careful test to 
decide whether scalding the corn fodder and corn will 
pay ; I doubt if it would. Cooking it well to soften 
the whole corn and coarse butts might pay on account 
of digestibility or assimilation of the food. Early cut, 
properly cured clover needs no improvement. I prefer 
ground corn and cob and don’t like to see whole grain 
in the manure. I cut my fodder five inches long to 
prevent waste and for convenience in handling the 
manure. Cut this length, the cows sort out the blades, 
and the coarse butts are used for bedding. I used to 
cut it fine and feed about one-half the quantity to 
compel them to eat all up clean. I thus fed less fodder 
and got less butter. I do not like onions, and I would 
not like my wife to chop them up with my fried pota¬ 
toes and starve me into eating them. I think a cow 
would better eat the coarse stalk as it grew than have 
it chopped in pieces with sharp edges, corners and 
splinters. j. n. rittenhouse. 
Pennsylvania. _ 
Western Iriumph Blackberry. —H. R. W., Benton Cen¬ 
ter, N. Y.—We think this variety would do well almost 
anywhere, as it is hardy and vigorous. The berries 
are irregular and too soft for market; hence it does 
not seem to have become generally popular. 
