The ranch. [volume] (Seattle, Wash.) 1902-1914, 1907-10-01

take it for granted that at about such
time of the year the cows will fail
in their milk shut our eyes and our
teeth and grin and bear it? Or is
there some way by which we may be
able to maintain the yield of milk
very nearly, if not quite, up to the
standard?
This latter possibility is what some
have made a probability and occa-
sionally a comparative reality, but
there is no secret about it. The only
thing is to feed. 1t must needs be
that pastures will fail. Nature has
fixed that so that we cannot dispute
her mandates. Grass does grow hard
and dry as the season advances. There
is less of the sweet juices that marked
the early spring months. And then
COWS are affected by the heat of sum-
mer. They do not like to go about
through the fields as they did earlier
But the most troublesome of all are
the flies which come with summer.
These worry the life almost out of
the COWS, especially if they are not
sprayed.
If we would keep our milk product
up, then, we must supply something
in the line of feed to take the place
of that which nature takes away; and
the less work the COWS have in get
ting that feed the more surely will
they respond to our efforts to main
| tain their flow. In two or three ways
we may do this. We may furnish our
COWS green feed, fresh from the fields,
or we may buy mill stuffs and feed
them. Or we may combine these two,
using some fresh feed and some
ground feed.
The man that has looked out for it
and has plenty of corn or oats and
peas or cowpeas is the man that is
now independent, as far as a man can
be, of the dearth in pasture grass.
But how does this help? Here is the
secret, so far as there is any secret,
of feeding: When the cow gets less
feed in the pasture she begins to
grow little thinner in flesh. If we
knew or realized as we might this
great fact we would work hard against
any such loss of flesh. For the mo-
ment the COW commences to fall off
| in weight, that moment she begins to
turn more of what she eats in the
direction of flesh making, with the
result that we miss the milk from the
pail.
| Suppose a man has herd of thirty
COWS, each one of which falls off one
quart day, and that is low esti-
mate. Many times our cows fail far
more than that at this trying season
of the year. But at one quart day
that means thirty quart can of milk
less every day. Thirty quarts of milk,
estimated very conservatively, is
worth ST. Made into butter it is worth
considerably more than that. Keep
up this loss for three or four months
and we have an actual money loss
of at least 500. Can we afford that?
But it is contended that it will cost
to feed cattle. How true this is we
know when we have to pay bills for
grain stuffs. But the wise thing to
do is to grow green stuffs on the
farm, so that we do not need to buy
so very much grain. Taking it for
granted, however, that we have
missed it and have no such green feed,
so that we must depend on mill stuffs,
it is the experience of the most care
full dairymen that it is better economy
to feed some grain than to permit the
cows to shrink badly. Once cow
is down she will stay down, unless
we bring her back by an expensive
system of feeding. The thing we
should do is to keep her from failing,
so far as possible. We cannot afford
to DO otherwise.