The Manchester Journal

Agricultural. Keeping Old Cows. It pays to run a machine as long as it can be made to return a fair profit on the cost of operating it. Using the old machine saves interest on a new investment, and the continued wear on it does not decrease its value, for the waste material in a condemned machine will be the same whether it is wholly or only half worn out. The case is quite different with farm stock, which can be used as food when it begins to diminish in usefulness to its owner. The man who keeps an ox or cow till it pines with old age, is a double loser by so doing. It invariably costs more in food and care to maintain an old animal than a young one. As the vigor of life fails, digestion is less perfect and assimilation slower and more difficult, and the waste is greater. As the decline goes on more and more food is required to produce a given amount of labor, or milk, or meat. Old animals can seldom be fattened at a profit, even if their flesh was as valuable as that of younger ones, because it requires so much more time and feed to do it. But their flesh is not equal to that of animals in their prime, so there is a loss, both in the quality and the cost of producing. Old cows that have been milked till their life force has been exhausted, make very poor and low priced, as well as expensive beef. When a cow has reached twelve or fourteen years of age, it hardly pays to fatten her, if she could be had for nothing. Some cows of extraordinary quality may be profitably kept as long as they can be, for the sake of either stock or milk, but average cows are better converted into beef before it would be appropriate to call them old.