BEEF AND BUTTER

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1523, 28 February 1901, Page 53

BEEF AND BUTTER

The Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station, after a long series of tests to discover the relative cost of producing a. pound of dressed beef and one of butter, has come to the following conclusions : We are somewhat interested in the report of the experiments of the Minnesota Experiment Station with a view of determining the relative _cost of butter and beef. These experiments seem to hear out the contention of dairymen that the food cost of a pound of butter is no greater than that of a pound of dressed beef. We cannot find space to give a detailed account of the experiment, and content ourselves with quoting the conclusions as drawn by the stations as follows : —■ , 1. With, 1001 b of grain and an equal amount of hay and roots, fo'ur steers made a gain of 24.191 b, and four cows with the same amount and kind of feed produced 12.041 b of butter. 2. The four steers consumed feed valued at 8.51d01, gained 4241 b, being an average daily gain of 2.521 b, costing 2c per lb, and returning lib gain for 8.21 b of dry matter. 3. The four cows consumed feed valued at 11.54d01., yielded 255.43ib of butter fat, being a butter equivalent of 297.99 lb, at a cost of feed of 3.97 c. per lb, producing lib of butter to 16.281 b of dry matter consumed. 4. Type has not so mhijch significance with a steer as it has with a dairy cow, for the reason that a steer not of good type may be a large feeder and a good digester, and convert all the food taken over his needs for maintenance into gain, while a cow not of the dairy type has the alternative of converting food either into milk or gain, and she may choose the latter at a time when the owner wants only the former. An American journal, in commenting on the foregoing, remarks): -—“Bear in mind that this is the food! cost, and, of course, does not include the labour, care, and improved shelter so necessary for the production of butter. Our readers will see at a glance the possibilities there are in dairying when they reflect that in addition to the butter the dairy cow produces in the skim milk the fleshforming elements of about, twice as much live weight in the shape of a calf as she produces pounds of butter. In other words a cow that will produce 200 pounds of butter in a year will furnish in tne skim milk the flesh-forming constitiujents of calf which in the milk season will weigh at least* 400 pounds, and if the farmer will make a trade with the pig, giving it the cow’s skim milk which the calf does not use in exchange for the corn to balance' up the calf’s ration, it will be readily seen that he can grow 100 pounds more live weight which .should! be credited to the cow.”