Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 March 1877 — The Value of Straw as Food. [ARTICLE]

The Value of Straw as Food.

Experience teaches us that cattle thrive best on a mixed diet; all hay or all grain will produce less beef than hay and grain. The animal structure of the ox also demands bulk in food as well as richness; the feeding of concentrated food being only profitable so far as the animal assimilates it, beyond that, simply increasing a manure heap at a cost far beyond its value. The ox has appropriately eleven pounds of stomach with only two and a half pounds of intestines to each 100 pounds of live weight; the sheep has less stomach and more intestines, giving a smaller percentage of digestive apparatus; while the pig, for every 100 pounds of his five weight, has only one and one-third pounds of stomach to six pounds of intestines. A steer would thrive well on a bulk of straw, with a little oil meal, that would shrink a sheep and starve a pig. Pork can be produced from clear corn meal, while mutton requires great varieties of food, and beef cattle would become cloyed and diseased with its exclusive use. A thoughtful attention to these broad tacts will change much injudicious feeding into cm. ■Japer meat production. One element into the economy of cattle feeding, the use of straw as fodder, has ne f received the attention its importance demands. On no one point is the average farmer so incredulous as regarding the value of straw to feed, and onmany farms the wasteful practice still exists of turning all the straw into the manure heap. If properly made and reasonably well cared for, a large part of the straw, especially of the oat crop, should be used as cattle-fopd. Early-cut straw is worth for feed twOtfiirds as much as hay, and is three times as valuable in feeding cattle as .in the manure heap. Pea haulm and bean straw, especially if in the latter the pods are attached, are of still greater value. The best heat-producing foods are wheat, corn, oats, hay and bran. Oat Straw will develop as large a percentage of heat as oil-cake; bean straw even more; and, in this respect, 100 parts of oat straw are equal to 80 parts of hay. Straw is deficient in flesh-forming material; it requires 100 parts oat straw to equal 16 parts good hay in this particular; yet, fed with cotton-seed or linseed-cake, it supplies what they lack in heat-giving and respiratory elements. For the purposes of feeding out oat straw, our oat crop is allowed to overripen,- a large amount of its nutriment being lost without any corresponding benefit to the grain, which never improves after the upper portion of the stem has commenced turning yellow. Oats cut when just turning from the green state yield more grain, as well as greater feeding value in straw. The narrow margins of profit in cattle-feeding in this section of the country demand the closest economies in the food supply, and the most thorough investigations and experiments with an article of so little present market value, and one of such abundance with most farmers, as oat straw.—American Cultivator.