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Show DAIRY AND POULTRY. INTERESTING CHAPTERS FOR OUR RURAL READERS. How Successful Farmers Operate This Department of the Farm A Few Hint an to the Care of L1t Stock and Poultry. Destroying; Oar Market Abroad. The secretary of agriculture o Missouri, Mis-souri, in his last report, says: Adulterated Cheese. Oneot the worst features of this business is that imitation imi-tation butter compounds and adulterated adulter-ated cheese are destroying the market not given as much prominence as aro the defective features of the worst, so as to show those interested that good milk is on the market as -veil as bad. A practicable plan by which this could be accomplished could easily be followed, fol-lowed, greatly to the benefit af all concerned. con-cerned. Although only a few dairies were visited, It was readily seen that at least a part of the milk going into Sacramento and San Francisco In produced pro-duced with great care and can be relied re-lied upon as a safe and wholesome food. As already suggested, if these first-class dairies and others like them could be brought to the attention of the public as forcibly as the worst types, a decided step would be taken toward the Improvement of the general city supply. for United States dairy products abroad. To illustrate, in 1880, the United States sold in Great Britain one hundred and twenty-eight million pounds of cheese, while Canada only sold forty million pounds or less than one-third what the United States did. In 1898 this condition of the trade was reversed, the United States selling to Great Britain only forty-six million pounds, while Canada sold one hundred hun-dred and fifty million pounds, or more than three times the amount sold by-the by-the United States, a condition that may be attributed almost solely to the fact that in this country the laws permitted per-mitted manufacturers' to brand skim mila and filled cheese as full cream tides, and as such it was exported and sold. Adulterated Butter. The same increase in-crease in the sales of Canadian butter and decrease in the sales of butter from the United States may be noted since butterine has been manufactured and placed upon the market in imitation of and sold as creamery butter. Indicating In-dicating this decrease in l$9!i, New York exported to Great Britain only sixty-five thousand packages, while Montreal exported two hundred and twenty-seven thousand packages, and in 1899, with Secretary "Wilson, of the United States department of agriculture, agricul-ture, making every possible effort to extend the sale of dairy products in Europe, New York exported one hundred hun-dred and three thousand packages, while Montreal exported four hundred and twenty-five thousand packages, or more than four times as much as this great country with its largely extended area, its abundance of all kinds of stock, food and grasses and its superior supe-rior climatic conditions. The pure food products of this country are equal in character to those of Canada. The demand should be as good and the supply far in excess. The unfavorable condition of our butter trade with Europe Eu-rope may be. attributed to the fact that we have offered for sale in that country coun-try fraudulent imitation articles, hat we have lost the confidence of consumers con-sumers and brought into question the purity of our product. Fowls With or Without Heat Foods. ' The Geneva experiment station has, as previously mentioned in the Farmers' Farm-ers' Review, been making trials in feeding feed-ing fowls with and without meat in their food. A part of the report says: The results were convincing, almost startling, in the case of ducklings fed the contrasted rations. The first lot of ducklings was fed on corn meal, ground oats, animal meal, and a little skimmilk and dried blood. The second lot was fed on wheat bran, corn meal, ground oats and skimmilk or curd. Both lots were fed green alfalfa; and sand and coarse grit were freely supplied. sup-plied. Before the experiment had been long under way it was not unusual to ; notice scrawny, grain-fed birds, with troughs full of good, apparently wholesome food before them, standing on the alert and scrambling in hot haste after the unlucky grasshopper or fly which ventured into their pen; while the contented-looking meat-fed ducks lay lazily, in the sun and paid, no attention to buzzing bee or crawling crawl-ing beetle. The 32 meat-fed birds live! and thrived; but the vegetable food birds dropped off one by one, starved to death through lack of animal food, so that only 20 of the 33 were alive at the close of the fifteenth week of contrasted con-trasted feeding. They were then fed for four weeks on the meat meal ration, ra-tion, and made nearly as rapid gains as the other lot at the same size, two months before; but they never quite overcame the disadvantage of their bad start on grains alone. Some of tha comparative averages for ten weeks from birth, the period of profitable growth for the larger ducks, are shown graphically below, the first figure or upper line representing the meat fed birds in each instance: Total weight attained. Cost of food for I I I i s I Pound Sam 48 111 Dry matter in food V''. for I ftound gain Making a Natural Starter. The method of making this natural starter is simple. There may be various vari-ous plans, but one which is satisfactory satisfac-tory enough is as follows: A perfectly healthy cow from a cleanly, well kept dairy is selected. After the under parts of the body are carefully brushed, and the udder moistened with a damp cloth, the first few jets of milk from the teats are rejected, and the rest is drawn into a sterilized vessel. This is then covered at once and taken to the dairy, heated to a proper temperature and passed througn a separator. The skim milk thus obtained is again collected col-lected in a sterilized vessel, carefully covered, and set aside to sour. After it has become properly soured it serves as a starter for the cream ripening process. Of . course there are many other methods of obtaining a natural starter, for a natural starter is nothing noth-ing more than a lot of skim milk or whole milk obtained under specially cleanly conditions from an exceptionally exception-ally good dairy and allowed to sour naturally. Of course it is impossible for the dairyman to be sure that such a natural starter contains the species of bacteria that Is wanted for ripening. Sometimes it may contain proper species and at other times an unfavorable unfavor-able species. Logically then the use of a natural starter is very unsatisfactory. unsatis-factory. But our dairymen are not so much interested in the logic of the method as they are in practical results,, re-sults,, and care not whether the process they use is theoretically the best, provided pro-vided it gives them a good quality of butter. There can be no question th.it the use of natural starters thus made has been a very decided advantage to the butter maker as it has been adopted in the last ten years. Clean and Unclean Dairies. A California milk inspector hag this to say: Unclean dairies have been so widely advertised in official reports and newspaper articles that many citizens citi-zens think well-conducted dairies do not exist, or, if they do, no way is known by which one can be assured of getting their milk. And many persons per-sons will go without milk whenever possible rather than run the risk of getting the dangerously impure article arti-cle which they are convinced Is very common. Thus the scarce articles have the effect of reducing the production and use of Impure milk; but they have the same effect also on the use of pure milk. It is unfortunate that the excellent ex-cellent features of tht best dairies are Si lbs. In conclusion, then, it may be said that rations in which from 40 to 5b per cent of the protein was supplied by animal food gave more economical results re-sults than rations drawing most ol their protein from vegetable sources. The chief advantage was In the production produc-tion of rapid growth, although the cosl of production is also in its favor. While inferior palatibility may hav had something to do with the marked results, especially with the ducks, tht whole bearing of these experiments and others not yet reported seems to Indicate In-dicate that the superiority of the one ration is due to the presence in it ol animal food. Chicks 00. Free Range. We notice that one poultry writer is advocating giving the old hen full liberty to drag her chicks anywhere. He says that if this be done, the chicks will be hardier, more fully developed and in every way better birds when mature than those reared to the weaning wean-ing age with the hen confined to a coop and a few square rods of ground. But we would suggest that the trouble comes in the fact that there are likely like-ly to be very few birds to mature. By the time the old hen has dragged the lives out of some of them, and cats and rats have had their pick, to say nothing of the bout with the gape worm, the number will be few. Nor are we convinced that it is healthful for a chick to be over exercised or that it is rendered hardy by being soaked with the dew or chilled by cold winds. When a hen drags her chicks to a remote re-mote corner of the farm the mink or cat finds it a good chance to gather in one of the stragglers now and then. Firm Fences. There is nothing in re'.ation to poultry keeping that gives more satisfaction than a well-built poultry fence of wire on posts that are so deeply set they will never incline in any direction. It pays to have a firnr fence. It will save a great deal ot vexation. The posts should be so deeply deep-ly set that they will stand wind and rain, frost and soil moisture-. This can be obtained only by having the holes dug so deep that the bottoms of the posts will be below the region subject to heaving in the spring, which doea not necessarily mean below the region of frost, The somnambulist who tumbles from a roof Is an illustration of one way to fall asleep. |