Oxford Democrat

Fish Hash for Farm Stock.

The present is just the time to impress upon the minds of our readers the necessity of a change in the winter keep of stock, in order to bring animals to the pasture the succeeding spring in good condition. Kept during the winter upon the best, cattle will look more or less rough and haggard by spring time—showing plainly that it is a palatable change of food that is necessary to keep them in good condition. Dry forage, at the best, is a sort of unnatural diet for our farm stock; and to obtain the most profit from it the course of winter feeding should be changed as often as the farmer may think the case demands. Potatoes or other roots furnish a most agreeable relish, but it is a question whether it is a paying operation to grow them as a winter feed for our stock. So too, of grain, corn, cotton seed and linseed meal or cake. Our farmers have not yet decided that they can afford to raise the former, or purchase the latter in order to keep their cattle growing and fattening through the winter. We know a very few of the latter—and who make the purchase of oil cake meal a profitable investment—in our State, and but few or none of the former. But it is certain that some such course as this must finally be adopted by those farmers who desire to make farming pay.

Among the materials which seem to be very well adapted to be employed in the much needed change of feed for farm stock during winter, and at the same time equally well fitted to keep the animal growing, and bring them out into the spring in nice condition are inedible fish and the refuse of fish after the oil has been expressed. Thousands and thousands of tons of this material is allowed to go to waste every year along our sea coast, partly because its value in the interior of the State is little known, and partly because men have so much to do they have no time to save it or turn it to account as a cattle food for transportation. Hon. Samuel Wasson, in an article in the Ellsworth American on the value of fish as a cattle food, says that "experiments now going forward, show that in our shoal water, inedible, and refuse fishes, nature has provided an ample supply of a highly nutritious cattle-food, a rich substitute for grain, roots, cotton-seed meal and oil-cake. The supply of these, in the smelts, tom-cod, flounders, sculpins, cunners, herrings, porgies, is illimitable. It is astonishing how greedily cattle and sheep will eat them, even when in an advanced stage of putridity, and more surprising still, with what rapidity domestic animals will 'lay on' flesh and fat, when supplied with them. Porgie chum, which by very many, is only endurable because of its extraordinary fertilizing properties, when properly prepared, becomes an inodorous and incomparably invaluable provender for horned cattle and sheep. When properly cured it imparts no offensive smell or taste to flesh, milk or eggs."

In the section from which Mr. Wasson writes many farmers have for more than a dozen years been in the practice of feeding their sheep with porgies, with most satisfactory results; and recently it has extended to neat stock and poultry with results equally as gratifying. We believe it will not be many years before the fish of the sea which now in such vast quantities are used only for the amount of oil they will yield, will be cut, pressed and ground, and sent into all parts of Maine, as auxiliary feed for stock in winter, and as a provender for any season. Fish-hash for breakfast three times a week would not be a bad change of diet for our farm animals during the winter months.

[Maine Farmer.]