Mr. T. Cooke Burroughs, a West Suffolk feeder, who used treacle in 1864, gives the following mode of mixing it with other food:—
My plan has been (and is still carried on) to give to each bullock per day (divided into three meals) one pint of treacle dissolved in two gallons of water, and sprinkled, by means of a garden water-pot, over four bushels of cut chaff (two-thirds straw and one-third hay) amongst which a quarter of a peck of meal (barley and wheat) is mixed, the animals also having free access to water. The cost of the treacle and meal together is about 3s. per bullock per week. My bullocks (two-year old Shorthorns) have grown and thrived upon the above diet to my utmost satisfaction; and even during the present dry and warm weather they evince no lingering after roots or grass. I am well aware that the use of treacle for neat stock is no new discovery of my own, as I learnt the system while on a visit to a friend in Norfolk, where some graziers have used it in combination with roots during many years past. Perhaps flax-seed (linseed) boiled into a jelly and used in a similar way, may be a more profitable "substitute for roots" than treacle; but the preparation of it is attended with more expense and trouble.
SECTION VIII.
CONDIMENTAL FOOD.
Although every farmer may not have used, there are few who have not heard of "Thorley's Condimental Food for Cattle." This nostrum is a compound of some of the ordinary foods with certain well-known aromatic and carminative substances. It possesses a very agreeable flavor, and it is therefore much relished by horses, and indeed by every kind of stock. The price of this compound was at first so much as £60 per ton; but owing to competition, and perhaps to the attacks made upon the enormously high price of this article, it is now to be obtained at prices varying from £12 to £24 per ton.
The inventor of condimental food, and the numerous fabricators of that compound, claim for it merits of no ordinary nature. Its use, they assert, not only maintains the animals fed upon it in excellent health, but it also exercises so remarkable an action upon the adipose tissues that fat accumulates to an immense extent. Moreover, it is said that an animal supplied with a very moderate daily modicum of this wonderful compound, will consume less of its ordinary food, though rapidly becoming fat.
Now, if these assertions were perfectly, or even approximatively, true, Mr. Thorley would be well deserving of a niche in the temple of fame, and stock-feeders would ever regard him as a benefactor to his own and the bovine species; but I fear that Mr. Thorley's imagination outstripped his reason when he described in such glowing terms the wonderful virtues of his tonic food.
Mr. J. B. Lawes, of Rothamstead, than whom there is no more accurate experimenter in agricultural practice, states that he made many careful trials with Thorley's food, and that he never found it to exercise the slightest influence upon the nutrition of the animals fed upon it. In his report upon this subject, Mr. Lawes, after describing the experiments which he made, sums up as follows:—
There is nothing therefore in the above results to recommend the use of Thorley's condiment with inferior fattening food, to those who feed pigs for profit. In fact, the following balance-sheet of the experiment shows that, in fattening for twelve weeks, there was a balance of £1 10s. 11d. in favor of the lot fed without Thorley's food, notwithstanding that one of the pigs in that lot did badly throughout the experiment, as above stated.