‘‘ Balanced Rations ” 
T he advocacy of Alfalfa and silage to take tlie 
place of grains and commercial feeds in a late 
issue is pleasing to me. They may not fit the figures, 
chemically, that call for a mixture of about all of 
the grains and meals, but they will give- results. 
There has been enough printing on balanced rations 
to fiil a box car, but during the time of the type set¬ 
ting. many men who knew nothing of this printed 
science, were successfully growing animals. 
The exact chemical ration may be found for man 
or beast but it seems to me that most of the efforts 
in that direction are useless. There was a year after 
the Civil War when flour was away higher than it 
is now, and our neighborhood had no wheat. People 
lived on pork, corn and apple butter, the boys 
brought “pone” to school and no one ever saw a 
healthier bunch of urchins. I brought a flock of 
ewes from the far pasture because they may need 
the stables any time, and they are fat enough for 
slaughtei'. They have had nothing hut natural grass 
the past year, which must have been a balanced ra¬ 
tion. They will get pasture, clover, Alfalfa, fodder 
and very little corn or oats and will give a fine lot 
of lambs. T. B. Terry, deceased, a very successful 
man and a writer, never fed his work teams any¬ 
thing but pasture and clover hay. Summer or Win¬ 
ter and they were always fat, and it is very possible 
as well as profitable to follow that course with all 
animals. This is from experience, and this is the 
Winter to save the grain. My knowledge of silage is 
limited to hearsay but I will grant it has a good 
place among the other home-grown feeds. 
One can pu.sh up emaciated animals or fit any 
wanted for a set time with grains, but well kept ones, 
as a general thing can get along very nicely with 
very little of it. There was a northern man looking 
at a southerner’s “four year old shotes,” (!0 pounders, 
and .saying: “Wliy don’t you feed your hogs? Up 
North we finish a hog at eight months,” and the 
“cracker” replied, with reference to a warm place, 
“What’s time to a hog?” That Is the other extreme. 
When I refer to pasture I mean good pasture that 
covers the ground in a mat. Also not moldy, coar.se 
clover and Alfalfa but hay well cured, fine and 
green, and I never 
see a land owner 
hauling feed hut I 
think if he had some 
fields and mows of 
fliat character, he 
would not look so 
poverty stricken. I 
always feel pity for 
the man who must 
buy feed. It shows 
he is either a manu- 
fiicturer buying i*aw 
material, or that he 
does not know what 
his own soil was 
made foi’. There 
has been so much 
mental strain on the 
fitness of balanced 
rations that its dis¬ 
cussion, and misin¬ 
formation, has made 
a market for thou- 
.sands of tons of feed 
which should h a v e 
been grown at home. 
It has sent home 
money to far away 
f a r m s , elevators, 
mills, railroads, deal¬ 
ers and to officials 
for inspection which 
did not always protect, and men dropped interest 
in improving their own soil and growing better feed 
of their own. 
The foregoing is written to say nice things for 
clover and Alfalfa. Any man who has mows of 
them is far above want. He will experience no 
liardship if the grain crop fails and the feed men 
go out of business. They are the foundation for 
making farming sixceessful, l)y furnishing feed and 
enriching the .soil. I'erhaps one or both have not 
grown in .some localities, but that only proves their 
necessity. An.v soil should be made to grow, at 
least one of them, so they are incentives to compel 
men to improve soil. They will not grow on poor 
soil but no one should have that kind. If the own¬ 
er made it poor, he is a robber and should make 
restoration, l)uh if done by former owners, the 
Itrosent one should set out at once the same as he 
would to make staiwed animals happy. If the 
family is sick, it is time to hunt a cun^ and if land 
■Ghe RURAL NEW-YORKER 
is sick it should have attention. It is as much 
of a duty to Improve soil as to feed animals or 
one’s family. The legumes demand phosphorus, 
lime and drainage, and sometimes manure. Profit¬ 
able land requires all these. Some may say they 
cannot get manure, but they can get rye, grass 
weeds, millet, sorghum, corn or something to turn 
under which will be a substitute, of if “lime is too 
high,” an inch of subsoil can be turned up with its 
lime and other chemicals and nature will fix it. It 
is impossible to pixt up a valid excuse for an own- 
Bull at Work in Vegetable Garden. Fig. 44 
ership of poor land, (lood feed and good .soil come 
by the way of the legumes. They cost effort and 
.sometimes money but always repay it, not only by 
the yield but by the education they give while work¬ 
ing for it. The man who enriches a field to get 
them, and finds it improved by them, will go to other 
fields and fix them. w. w. Reynolds. 
Ohio. 
Gov. Hoard on Family Breeding 
[On page 12 there is a discussion on “Pure Blood” as 
worked out in certain New England families. The fol¬ 
lowing remarks by Ex-Gov. W. D. Hoard of Wiscon¬ 
sin will interest many of our readers.] 
SUPPOSE the same biological laws in heredity 
govern with humans that they do with the rest 
of the animal creation. The bi’oeders of our domes¬ 
tic animals have followed the rule of rigid selec¬ 
tion as well as i)ure blood infusion and in this way 
only could they keep them from deterioration. With 
the New England families straight line breeding 
without vigorous .selection could only result at last 
in a diminution of the original stock. I often 
thought on the decay that I saw in the old farmer 
families of Central New York. When I was a boy 
there, the locality was filled with a splendid race of 
farmers, of gi-eat powers of mind and high am¬ 
bition in everything they did. 
q’hen the Civil War came and there was a .serious 
lo.ss of the best blood and brain of that section, so 
that by issO I could see that the men of the farm 
there averaged nowhere neai‘ what their fathers 
did. The old stock had sound ideas about keeping 
up the fertility of their farms, in preserving their 
wood lots, keeping the crest of the hills covered 
with the I'l-iLdnal forest, fi'heir sons cared for none 
of these things. It was not long before the old 
farms gave distressing evidence that they had fallen 
into the hands of a ilifferent sort of men. 
109 
In the Middle West there was a mixture of the 
best blood, of the East mingled with the vigorous 
strains of Norway, Ireland, Switzerland and Ger¬ 
many. Their descendants have intermarried and 
they are handling the destinies of the section with 
vigor and strength. For twenty years, I made Win¬ 
ter visits to the New England States in lecture 
work on dair.v questions before their annual meet¬ 
ings. ]\Iy first visit to Connecticut, I shall never 
forget. I was waited upon by some of their lead¬ 
ing men and told that I must not mention the B.ab- 
cock test; that they were perfectly satisfied with 
the Cooley can system of inch measurement. You 
ma.y imagine my surpri.se. However, I told them 
that I must be allowed to speak the truth as I saw 
it or I would not speak at all. To this they fin¬ 
ally consented and I gave them a good dose of 
Babcock. Such narrowness of vision was amazing 
to me. But it could not I’esist the light very long. 
’Phere is something to your theory, grading down 
rather than up, because of too long continued breed- 
in,g in certain lines. 
q’he mixture of races has never done this Nation 
an.v harm. There is one point that has always ap¬ 
pealed to me. We can assimilate any nationality 
if we can intermarry. But an.v race that we can¬ 
not make families out of. like the Negroes, Chinamen 
and Japanese, block the pathway and will con¬ 
stantly prove a source of irritation rather than har¬ 
mony, so in the last anal.vsis, our National growth 
and security is based on the family relation. It 
would have been better for New England if her 
sons and dau.ghters had intermarried more with the 
West and South. w, d. hoard. 
An Ox-power Farm 
G'r long ago we printed a note from a M'a.s.sa- 
chusetts man who thought of using a single ox 
to do the team work in producing a crop of pota¬ 
toes. He gave some very ingenious arguments to 
show that such an ox would fill the bill. We print¬ 
ed it more as a curiosity than anything else, but 
have been astonished to find letters coming from 
all over the country about this proposition. Quite 
a number of people have an ox which they wish 
to sell, q'his ox has been trained apparently for 
plowing or cultivat¬ 
ing, and some large 
stories are told of 
the value of ox-jiow- 
er. Every one wants 
to .see the experi¬ 
ment undertaken. Ai)- 
parently there are a 
number of perilous 
living near town 
with a few acres of 
land. They would 
like to raise a crop 
in the.se days of high 
prices, but the cost 
of 01 dinary hor.se la¬ 
bor is prohibitive 
Man.v of them keep 
ji car and do not 
want to bother with 
the care of a horse. 
The.v semn to think 
that an ox will pret¬ 
ty much take care of 
hiiiLself if given a 
.small pasture, water 
a fair a m o u n t of 
grain. One man 
sends us the picture 
shown at Fig. 44 de¬ 
scribing the harness 
u.sed on a Holstein 
bull. It is .said that 
this hull did all the work in the vegetable garden 
hauling off stones and other team work. The har¬ 
ness was obtained from one of the large mail or¬ 
der houses in Chica.go, and this .seems to show that 
a numher of people throughout the country are 
really making u.se of our solid friend, the o.x. The 
whole thing is very much of a new one to most of 
us, and we shall all want to .see the result of this 
experiment. Of cour.se some of the big farmers will 
smile at all this, but let them i-ememher that there 
ai’e thou.sands of commuters to whom the problem 
of economically raising a crop on a few acres is a 
lar.ge pi’oposition. 
Many cattle are capable of as high degree of 
training as the best horses. We knew one man 
with a yoke of oxen so well broken that he drove 
them from the top of a load of ha.v on hilly 
fields, stopping when necessary and holding back 
at the word of command us well as horses reined 
in tightl.v. 
Copyright, W. Ward Smith 
A Group of Prominent Live Stock Men at the N. Y. State Breeders Association Meeting. Fig. 45. 
Left to right, F. W. Sessions, Pres., N. Y. State Agricultural Society; Dr. R. S. Wende; Gordon E. Phetteplace; H. B. Harpending; C. J. Huson; 
E. S. Akin; Dr. V. G. Houck; Wayne Dinsmore; Albert E. Brown; Wing R. Smith 
