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Show WPaMemBBjaBvaBMMaBMiMaaMSMSNBssMHHMW DAIRYING. HOW MISTAKES COST. By Edgar L. Vincent. Yes, how they do cost. Some yuors ago when coining on the farm I bought a -cow of a neighbor. neigh-bor. He told me she was as good as she looked, audi to my eyes she looked first rate; and in some ways she was all right. She gave good milk and a good lot of it. She was healthy and hearty. She was pleasing to look at and the children loved her; still, she had a bad habit of kicking. Xow, 1 do not say that the man who sold mc that cow knew she had this failing; perhaps he did not. I am convinced that some cows arc very sensitive to the touch of the hands of some men. I do not know why this is so; but wc all have seen cows that were "on needles" all the time while a certain milker had the job on hand. Let another man sit down and this feeling of unreal seemed to pass off and the cow stand perfectly well. But this is not what I wished to speak about now. From that cow we raised a number of calves. They were always good ones, large, with dreamy big eyes -and perfect beauties in many ways. But it may surprise you to know that every cow of that breeding had the same failing of kicking. A'nd they would kick hard, too. Their muscles were strong and seemed to be well developed, especially in the legs. It took us years to weed that blood out of the dairy, as we nt length determined de-termined to do. Pretty costly, was it not, to bring that cow in the herd? Costly in time, costly in strength, costly in patience. After that wc had a little experience experi-ence with a bull calf. That came from a neighbor, also, who had pure bred cows. If I had known as much about them when I bought the calf as I did afterward I would have looked farther for my bull calf. Wc got the calf home unci did the very best we could by it, so that it came to maturity in good condition. But it never brought us a Single good calf. The bull himself was always an inferior animal, both in looks and achievements. He was not an animal that we could be proud of. Somehow he must have taken away back to some ancestor that jvris below the standard. When one gets his hopes fixed on doing a certain thing, it is rather discouraging dis-couraging to have the dreams all come to nothing. It takes so much time to work back out of a whole of that kjnd. Everything seems to pull the wrong way. And yet, one ought not to let himself be overcome in any such way. There is time enough with the most of us to rise above a defeat of the very gravest sort. And so we found when wc got over smarting at our mistake. It was not one wc were at all to blame for. Another serious mistake is to buy cows that are not healthy. In these days when so much is being said about tuberculosis, one needs to be exceedingly careful lest he bring into his herd a cow which is suffering from this terrible scourge and which may innoculalc his whole dairy. Wc cannot do bettor than to insist upon a good bill of health for every cow we purchase, particularly if she be a full-blooded cow. Often costly mistakes arc made in the matter of building our bams. Did you ever hear a man say, "A fellow must build, two or three barns to khow what he really needs and ought to have?" That is so common an expression ex-pression that I venture to say you cannot find a man that has ever built a barn who has not used it. Wc of today have an advantage in this respect which our fore-fathers did not. Some splendid barns are now to be found in almost every part of the country. Wc may visit these and get pointers for our own use. So, too, there arc some fine books devoted de-voted just to barn plans. These are well worth buying for the assistance they may be to the prospective builder. build-er. Many a man has worked along almost al-most all his life in a barn so unhandy, so poorly fitted for the work to be done in it that he has wasted strength enough and time enough to build a new barn many times over; and the cost of such a bavn in retarding the farm operations can scarcely be calculated. calcu-lated. But it would be useless, perhaps, to speak of these' mistakes if the way 0 HMlMMMIMkMSSJMMMMSaMMMBMBMtSMSBnajaBBJBBns were not pointed out to escape them. In part I have tried to do this as I have been going along. For the rest let mc say, that in buying a cow, let us be careful to have it in the bargain that if she is not as represented wc may have the privilege of returning her. One of the best horsemen I know of always has this in his contracts: con-tracts: "If the horse is not as I teil you, bring him back." That is n good thing, for him and for the buyer. Again, in buying a calf there is not so much chance for fore-sight. Almost Al-most everything rests on the integrity integ-rity of the man you buy of and he may be mistaken. The best you can do is to find out what the father and mother moth-er arc and what they have done and look the calf over as carefully as possible. pos-sible. It takes a good judge of stock to do any of these things but wc may icarn by experience. |