Had I estimated the value of her milk at the retail price, I should add one cent per quart for summer, and two cents per quart for winter. The next year this same cow, with the increase of the equivalent of one and a half pounds of meal per day, to allow for her increased growth, and a slight deviation in the matter of feed during the summer, whereby she obtained more green food, of which I shall speak hereafter, increased her profit almost forty per cent.
GARGET.
Of one thing I am very careful, and that is, not to allow the inflowing milk, previous to calving, to harden in the udder, and in all my long experience, in owning cows, I have never had a case of garget. When I was a boy about twelve years of age, my father purchased a very large milker for those days. I noticed that the right hind quarter of her udder was much smaller than the other, and yielded a correspondingly less quantity of milk. After she had been dried off, and the time approached for her to calve, I observed that this same quarter of her udder became very much more distended than the others. Her whole udder was very much distended, but this quarter excessively so. As her period of calving was delayed, and her udder became more inflamed, producing, evidently, great pain to the cow, I asked the privilege of milking her, and was denied. At the same time I was given to understand that it was the worst possible thing that could be done for the cow; that it was necessary that her udder should become thus distended, in order to give it the capacity to contain the flow of milk after calving; that should she be milked before calving, the yield after calving would be very much lessened, etc. By the time she calved, her udder was one indurated mass, and that particular quarter of it so much inflamed that she could not bear to have the calf touch it. In the course of time, however, by copious applications of cold water, and various liniments, the inflammation was reduced, but that particular section of the udder, which had been sufficiently distended to hold her whole yield, was shrunken to its old dimensions, and was no larger than when I first saw her. When the time approached for her to drop her next calf, I took the responsibility of clandestinely milking her, so that when she calved there was no inflamed udder, there was no fussing with liniments. Its four quarters were now evenly developed; the only difference was the former shrunken quarter was larger, if anything, than the others, and, throughout the season, the yield of milk, from the same keeping, was essentially increased over the yield of the previous year. I never disclosed the secret, however, until I was grown up. But I acquired a very useful lesson which I applied in my practice long before the theory that it was best to milk a cow previous to calving was generally adopted by owners around me.
TETHERING.
A professional friend of mine is the owner of three horses and two imported cows, all of which are kept in very high condition. He informs me that for several years, with the exception of one year, two and one half acres of land have furnished all the hay consumed by the five animals, together with pasturage for one cow; the other cow being dry during the summer, is pastured in the country. His land is naturally good grass land, being moist, well drained, and perfectly smooth. The apparatus for tethering his cow, when at pasture, consists of a pole or joist, the short end of which is weighted, swiveled on an iron upright, standing, when in position, about four feet above the ground, giving the apparatus the appearance of a model of an old-fashioned well sweep. The halter being attached to the upper end, is always above her back while feeding. This arrangement allows the cow the range of a circuit thirty feet in diameter. The upright is removed to the arc of the circle at morning and noon. In this manner she traverses the length of the lot, four hundred feet, in fourteen days, when she is brought back to the starting point, to repeat the journey again. In this manner, twelve thousand feet of land is made to furnish pasturage for one cow during the entire summer, and besides this, she has no feed whatever. The cow is always in good condition, and the ground never appears very closely cropped, and I have no doubt that were she restricted to one quarter of an acre, or ten thousand eight hundred and ninety feet, she would still be better fed than most cows that are at pasture. The droppings of the cow are daily removed from this range, so that she always has a clean feeding ground. All the manure made by the five animals is annually returned to this lot, and, in addition, the owner informs me, once in three years he gives it a dressing of a ton of ground bone.
PEARL MILLET.
After reading of Mr. Peter Henderson’s experiment with Pearl Millet, as described in the “American Agriculturist,” I determined to make a trial with it myself. Accordingly, last year, I sowed an area of eighteen square rods with it, in drills, fourteen inches apart; six rods were set apart to be cut and dried for fodder. The product of the other twelve rods was fed green. On the twentieth of June, a month after sowing, the growth measured about three feet in hight. On this date we commenced cutting it, and feeding to the cow all she would eat. She ate it with a greater apparent relish than any other green feed that had been given her. The cutting was finished on the twenty-fifth of July, on which day the last cutting measured about four feet in hight. The second cutting was commenced on the twenty-seventh of July, and finished on the twenty-second of August, the growth averaging nearly three and a half feet. The third cutting was commenced on the twenty-third and finished on the thirty-first of August. The growth was about two feet at the beginning of the cutting, but not more than ten inches at the finish. The fourth and last cutting was commenced on the sixteenth, and finished on the twenty-first of September, after which the ground appeared exhausted, and no further growth was made. The twelve rods cut and fed green yielded feed sufficient for seventy-five days, aside from her usual ration of bran or oil meal, while the product from the six rods, cut and fed dry, only two cuttings being made, was sufficient to feed her for thirty-four days, making a total feed for one hundred and nine days, from eighteen rods of ground; at which rate it would require sixty and one-quarter rods of ground to furnish forage for a year.
AN EXCELLENT COMPOST.
The only stable manure I use on my crops is that made by my cow. All my other fertilizers are artificially produced. In the course of the year, in prosecuting my regular business, I render some two hundred thousand pounds of tallow. This is all done by boiling it with sulphuric acid. The acid attacks and decomposes the animal tissue, leaving the rendered tallow floating on its surface. A part of the dissolved animal tissue, together with the bones that are sometimes smuggled in with the rough fat, settles to the bottom of the tanks, and a part remains dissolved in the acid. This spent acid, together with the deposit in the bottom of the tanks, is the source of all my nitrogen, except what may be in the manure from the cow, as well as a portion of my phosphorous. I have occasion to use considerable of the potash of commerce in some of my manufactures. For my land, I make of this a saturated solution, and then dry it, by stirring into it a mixture of equal parts of ground plaster and sifted coal ashes. This, in a few days, becomes sulphate of potash, lime, and coal ashes, at least I judge that it does, for it loses all its causticity.
In preparing my fertilizers, I mix the product of my tanks with loam, near the place to be planted; this, in the spring, is dug over and mixed with the manure from the stable. The effect of this mixing is to make the manure very fine in a very short time. After plowing, this compost is spread upon the land, and harrowed in. I then follow with ground bone, which costs me, delivered at my place, bolted, twenty-five dollars per ton, at the rate of twelve hundred pounds to the acre, and with the potash mixture, at the rate of two hundred and forty pounds to the acre, which is also harrowed in. In distributing the potash, I distribute more of it where I intend to plant peas or potatoes, and less where I intend to plant corn, squashes, and turnips. In distributing the bone, I reverse this. It is on a light, sandy loam, fertilized in this manner, with an excess of nitrogen, no doubt, that I expect, the coming summer, to raise enough feed for a cow on less than half an acre of ground. The land on which my experiment was tried last year was a turned sod that had had no manure of any kind for more than ten years. This year it will be tried on land that was manured as above last year.