Keeping one cow / Being the experience of a number of practical writers, in a clear and condensed form, upon the management of a single milch cow

by Various

JERUSALEM ARTICHOKES AS COW-FEED.

BY CHRISTOPHER SHEARER, TUCKERTON, PA.

Butter and milk are not only luxuries, but in many families they are indispensable necessaries of life. In this article my principal purpose is to show how a cow can be kept with the greatest economy of land and labor. I consider these the essential points in the discussion. Where hay is dear and pasture scarce, a man who lives by the labor of his hands, cannot ordinarily afford to purchase the necessary food for a cow; and if he has only an acre or two of land at his disposal, he finds it more profitable to raise other products. Ordinarily it requires the yield of several acres of land to support a cow. But I propose to show that this can be done on less than one acre, by raising the proper crops, and treating the soil to the best advantage. A cow of ordinary size will consume about eleven thousand pounds of hay, or its equivalent, in a year. The equivalent of this amount of hay is—in potatoes, thirty thousand eight hundred pounds, or five hundred and thirteen bushels, and in Indian corn, seven thousand seven hundred pounds, or one hundred and thirty-seven bushels. These quantities cannot be raised on one acre, and if we examine the tables of equivalents of food, we find that most of the grasses, grains, and roots, are objectionable on account of unproductiveness, want of sufficient nutritive qualities, or of the labor that the cultivation of them requires.