Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 July 1874 — A Plea for the Cows. [ARTICLE]

A Plea for the Cows.

Reader, are you fond of milk? Do you like butter or beef? Then have compassion on-the kitfd, generous eow! Most farmers feed their horses something better Than straw or badly-cured hay in the winter, though their work during that season is light. Horses are usually kept in comfortable stables, with clean, dry bedding, renewed every night. They are also curried and brushed every morning, and fed good bay, oats, chop, etc., until they are “ fat as fools,” as if they were being prepared for the butcher, in stead of being kept for labor. This is curious philosophy. A fat man is not in a condition to endure hard work, nor is he as comfortable or healthy as a person in moderate flesh. It will usually be found that those who thus overfeed their horses are' the very men who starve their cattle. In summer they are turned into the woods lot, the fallow field or the highway; while the horses are always “in clover-.” In winter the milch cow runs the road by day, and at niglit lies or stands shivering in tlie wet or muddy barnyard, or is treated to the -tuftury of a snow-bank for a bed. She catsstrawand corn fodder, with' an occasional frozen pump® in! And yet she is expected* to yield daily gallons of that most indispensable article of food, milk. Is it strange that she grows poor, or that her calf is unthrifty? If we have no coi*passion for the cattle, and disregard the divine edmmand to treat them with kindness, considerations of pecuniary interest ought to correct this cruel aud inhuman practice., ' A cow that is poorly fed cannot give much milk, nor milk of a good quality, for the plain reason that it is among the most nutritious of all the substances we consume, and cannot therefore be manufactured from food that does not contain nutritious elements. Some farmers instruct their wives that “ corn must not be fed to the cows, because it dries them up.” But tfie women —God bless them!—have compassion upon the kind and docile ahimal upon whose system such severe drafts are being constantly made, and therefore insist upon furnishing food that will repair this Waste.

High feeding for cows in milk pays as well as generous feeding for steers. Let us see. Milk sells readily in the country villages for four cents a quar>, while in the cities it brings a higher price. Suppose the cow to give three gallons a day, we have forty-eight cents, or something over fourteen dollars per month, as the value of her product. What other animal will make such generous returns for food, care and generous feeding? If we consider the profits resulting from raising the calves for steers we shall have reasons equally conclusive in favor of generous keep. Whether markets be good or bad, the well-kept steer, in good form and of good quality, always sells at a profit to the breeder. But we cannot have good form, good condition, aud good quality where the calf was not properly started. A runted calf becomes “ paunchy” and unthrifty, a form which subsequent good keep will seldom correct. The true principle therefore is, if we regard the matter only in a pecuniary point of view, to feed well, feed as much as possible in-doors, and we shall have more manure; and the manure where the cattle are well fed will be of better quality. Our-land needs the manure as much as our cattle need the nutritious food; and thus it is, as the English say, the mofe we feed the more we can produce. We should never feed in the high way. If we cannot feed in-doors we should certainly feed on our own land, and aim to select a place where it will do the most good.— T. G. J., in National Live Stock Journal.