Raising Better Calves.

Another spring opens with hundreds of thousands more calves to raise. And flocks of the little fellows will be fed wrong or out of dirty pails, and kept off in dark, evil smelling barns and otherwise misused. And a lot of them will be upset in their stomachs and will look sad-eyed and scrawny and abused.

Doesn't it make you just a mite miserable to ponder thereon?

Here now, is the right way to nourish a calf.

Let it get its mother's first milk above everything else. Nature has dosed this with properties needful to the calf's health. After 24 hours you can wean the calf from its mother, but let it have whole warm milk for two weeks. Then you can shift the little chap gradually to skim milk and actually raise a better cow than on whole milk. But let the skim milk be sweet and fresh, and fed in a pail as clean as you draw it in from the cow, if you would dodge trouble with scours and other digestive ills. And the calf must also be fed grain and good clover or alfalfa hay as soon as it will eat. This is at three or four weeks of age.

How much milk? Not too much or you'll damage the calf. As a rule three to five quarts daily is enough on the start, increasing this amount to seven to nine quarts if you have that much, as the calf grows.

At six weeks, the calf should be eating half a pound of grain daily and nibbling quite a little hay. At six months, three pounds of grain daily is not too much if you want to grow it into a choice cow or bull.

A good grain mixture for calves is equal parts of ground corn, ground oats or barley, wheat bran, and oil meal. But use what grains you have, giving a variety and not leaving out both the oats and oil meal, which makes bone and muscle.

If you are selling milk you can begin to cut down the calf's feed of that at eight weeks, stopping it altogether at 10 to 12 weeks. But of course, you must feed more grain and clover or alfalfa hay.

Powdered milk which can be bought for about half the price of whole milk, raises good calves. And some fine ones are raised up largely on calf meals. You can put the youngster on one of these--several good ones on the market--at five or six weeks, gradually increasing the amount and cutting down on the milk, until seven or eight weeks, when the milk can be stopped entirely. You feed calf meal in a warm gruel--about five quarts of water to a pound of gruel.

One other thing the calf must have is sunlight--direct from Old Sol, and not through glass--every warm day. And when the green stuff starts, it should go out on pasture, of course.

"Now," said the teacher, "what bright little boy can tell me five things that contain milk?"

"I can," shrieked a freckledfaced midget, "butter an' cheese an' ice cream an' two cows."

"Does it pay to feed grain to cows on good pasture?"--R. L. N.

Yes, if they're good cows. No, if they're just ordinary or poor ones. A cow that milks well can't graze enough pasturage to make the most milk she can give. She needs some concentrates.

"What would be a good grain mixture for cows on pasture in this section?"--A. L., Va.

Equal parts ground corn, wheat bran, ground oats and cotton seed meal. Feed about a pound for every four pounds of milk the cow gives.

The richer the cream, the easier it is to churn. But have it fairly cool--about 70 degrees--or else you'll lose a good deal of butter. Thin cream must be churned quite a little warmer, and then you can hardly help losing some of the fat. Skim it richer and churn it cooler.

Dr. George T. Warren, Economist at the New York Agricultural College, thinks that prices of dairy cattle will improve till about 1931, and then decline. Rising prices up to that time will, he believes, lead dairymen to raise too many heifer calves.

"Are you Mr. Smith?" asked the passer-by of the owner of a big Holstein farm. "Yes, why?" was the answer. "Well, you better get down to that lower field--there's a man sitting up in the tree exasperating your bull."

"What is good for a cow that has lumpy, stringy milk?"--T. S., Vt.

Your cow has garget. Reduce her feed, and give her three-fourths of a pound of Epsom salts, followed by an ounce of saltpeter daily for three or four days. Milk gently several times a day till the swelling goes down, and if the udder is very swollen and heavy, support it with a wide strip of cloth over her back, cutting holes through it for the teats. Also bathe the udder with hot water two or three times a day, and rub into it a salve made by dissolving two tablespoonsful of gum camphor in a cup of melted lard.

One form of garget is chronic and "catching," and if you get that into your herd, the only cure is to sell off the affected cows.