American Agriculturist 
THE FARM PAPER THAT PRINTS THE FARM NEWS 
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“Agriculture is the Most Healthful, Most Useful and Most Noble Employment of Man .’’—Washington 
Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Established 1842 
Volume 112 For the Week Ending December 15, 1923 _ Number 24 
Why Is a Feed Manufacturer? 
A Wednesday Evening Radio Talk Broadcast from WEAF 
T HE Editor of American Agriculturist 
has invited me to talk to you about a very 
important subject. It is so important that 
I made a trip from Detroit to New York 
City—hopeful that I may, in the ten minutes 
allotted to me, say something that will help to 
bring three separate groups of people a little more 
closely together. These three groups are the city 
dwellers, the farmers and the feed manufacturers. 
My subject has to do with cows, dairy feed and 
the dairy business in general. Therefore, those 
of you who do not own and milk cows have an 
interval in which, if you like, you can go and fix 
the fire or see what the baby is doing. 
I hope, however, that 
you will listen instead, 
for we manufacturers 
who prepare the raw 
material out of which 
cows make the milk that 
will be on your doorstep 
tomorrow morning—and 
our farmer and dairy¬ 
man friends—feel that 
you and we are not well 
enough acquainted. 
If we all ate more dairy 
products we would be a 
lot healthier, and we 
would get more actual 
value in return for each 
dollar we spend for food. 
America needs to be 
brought back to the 
dairy cow. Five other 
nations consume more 
whole milk per capita 
than we do. We are 
fifth in per capita 
consumption of but¬ 
ter and tenth in per 
capita cheese consump¬ 
tion. But some day we are going to be on top. 
That gets me right up to rubbing elbows with 
the main point of my remarks, for I want to tell you 
what the feed manufacturer is doing to help put 
Uncle Sam at the head of the dairy list. We have 
undertaken a tremendous task. We prepare the 
food of millions of cows all over the I nited States 
and some of us are doing it for foreign countries, 
too. From the cotton fields of Texas, the wheat 
fields of the northwest, the sugar-beet farms of the 
middle west, the flax fields of Minnesota, Montana 
and South America come the grains from which 
the by-products—the cottonseed meal, the bran, 
middlings, corn gluten, dried beet pulp, and the 
linseed oil meal which the feed manufacturer 
must process and combine into food for cows. 
It was not until we got to doing this for thousands 
upon thousands of herds that we realized how big 
a job it is to make feed for just one herd or one 
cow. 
Years ago, before there were any feed plants, 
the dairyman drove to his grist mill, bought a few 
sacks of bran, cottonseed meal and whatever other 
things he thought he ought to feed his cows and 
took them all home with him. Then he poured 
out the sacks on the barn floor and mixed them 
By SEARLE MOWAT 
all together according to his particular formula, 
if he had one. Each batch was entirely different 
from the other. 
Some of you think we do substantially the same 
thing in our feed plants—that we are just “feed 
mixers.” The fact is that if a good dairy ration 
could be put together by these simple methods 
there would be no place for the feed manufacturer. 
However, it cannot—the feed manufacturer is 
not just a “feed mixer,” by any means. He is a 
scientist — a chemist—something of a veterinarian 
— an expert in nutrition — an expert grain buyer — 
an engineer—and a practical dairyman too. That 
is to say, a modern feed manufacturer must have 
and use the service of men who know all these 
filings. 
In the first place he must have a correct formula. 
He must have a recipe for making feed and one 
which actual tests have proved to be exactly 
right. He has to have cows and a dairy farm of his 
own and keep trying out his ration day in and day 
out, as a daily check on its merit. Then he has to 
be trying out new formulas, new ingredients, new 
ideas of all kinds, constantly trying to find some 
way to improve his formula—some way to give 
his customers something better than what now 
seems to be the best. 
Thoughtful feeders of dairy cattle select a brand 
of dairy feed which they have found by actual tests 
to be uniformly balanced and best in every way for 
the cow’s health and production. Furthermore, it 
must be made by a feed manufacturer in whom 
they have confidence. They stick to this ration, 
feeding it year after year, because they know it 
should not be changed, until still further tests have 
proven some other formula to be still better. But 
these changes the thoughtful feeder leaves to the 
manufacturer, confident that the latter will notify 
him of any changes that are made in the formula 
and that none will be made until many months 
and even years of experiments .and tests have 
proven them to be right and proper. 
So much for the formula. Now let’s talk about 
the manufacturing processes. The feed manu¬ 
facturer buys thousands of tons of each of the 
various ingredients he uses and for that reason 
he must be absolutely sure that he gets good 
ones. He cannot guess at their quality. He must 
know, for cows are just as fussy about the quality 
of their food as human beings are. For example, 
when a carload of bran reaches his plant the 
manufacturer sends out his chemist to take 
samples of various parts 
of the car and bring 
them to the laboratory 
for analysis. The chem¬ 
ist must test those 
samples for moisture, fat, 
fiber, acidity, ash, pro¬ 
tein—a whole list of 
things that are mighty 
important to cows, and 
which few people but 
chemists know anything 
about. This applies to 
every other ingredient as 
well. Each one of the 
scores and hundreds of 
carloads must be tested 
in exactly the same way. 
If he finds the car in 
good condition and up to 
a certain fixed standard 
of quality it is then un¬ 
loaded. It cannot be 
dumped into one pile, 
however. It must be 
scattered over a large 
surface and mixed with 
other carloads of bran 
in the storehouses and then again in special tanks 
higher than a 3-story building. Thus the bran as 
it finally goes into the feed is what you might 
call a “blend” of scores of carloads of bran, each 
one made by Mother Nature just a little bit differ¬ 
ent from the others, but all toning down to an 
unchanging blend as it goes to be mixed with the 
other ingredients. This is done, not just with bran 
alone, but with each separate ingredient, in order 
to provide the dairy cow with an unvarying ration 
of the same quality and nutritive value. 
Then these ingredients have to be carefully pro¬ 
portioned, so that there is not more bran or more 
cottonseed meal in one lot of the finished product 
than in another. The percentage of each ingre¬ 
dient must bq kept exactly the same or the cow 
that eats it will notice the difference and so will the 
man who milks her. These apparently slight 
changes in the quality of each ingredient may 
easily throw a cow off feed and cause her owner a 
serious loss of milk, for once “off her feed” it is 
practically impossible to bring her back in produc¬ 
tion until after she has another calf. 
But there is still another big job in making a 
dairy ration. No matter where the bran, the 
('Continued on page If 12) 
Wim 
A fleet of lake vessels in the harbor of Buffalo loaded with grain for our eastern dairy cows. Each vessel has 
a capacity of from 300,000 to 500,000 bushels of wheat 
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