Agriculture for Beginners - Daniel Harvey Hill (love letters to the dead .TXT) 📗

EXERCISE

Can you recognize drones, workers, and queens? Do bees usually limit their visits to one kind of blossom on any one trip? What effect has the kind of flower on the flavor of the honey produced? What kinds of flowers should the beekeeper provide for his bees? Is the kingbird really an enemy to the bee?

In the first place, we give various kinds of feed stuffs to our animals that they may live. The heart beats all the time, the lungs contract and expand, digestion is taking place, the blood circulates through the body—something must supply force for these acts or the animal dies. This force is derived from food.

In the next place, food is required to keep the body warm. Food in this respect is fuel, and acts in the same way that wood or coal does in the stove. Our bodies are warm all the time, and they are kept warm by the food we eat at mealtime.

Then, in the third place, food is required to enable the body to enlarge—to grow. If you feed a colt just enough to keep it alive and warm, there will be no material present to enable it to grow; hence you must add enough food to form bone and flesh and muscle and hair and fat.

In the fourth place, we feed to produce strength for work. An animal poorly fed cannot do so much work at the plow or on the road as one that receives all the food needed.

Both food and the force produced by it result from the activity of plants. By means of sunlight and moisture a sprouting seed, taking out of the air and soil different elements, grows into a plant. Then, just as the plant feeds on the air and soil to get its growth, so the animal feeds on the plant, to get its growth. Hence, since our animals feed upon plants, we must find out what is in plants in order to know what animal food consists of.

Plants contain protein, carbohydrates, fat, mineral matter, water, and vitamins. You have seen protein compounds like the white of an egg, lean meat, or the gluten of wheat. The bodies of plants do not contain very much protein. On the other hand, all plant seeds contain a good deal of this substance. Animals make use of protein to form new blood, muscles, and organs. Because of the quality of protein, milk is the best food for children and young animals.

The protein in some foods is of poor quality. To insure a well-balanced supply of protein a variety in foods is desirable. Do not rely on a single kind of mill feed, but combine several kinds, such as cotton-seed meal, linseed meal, wheat bran and middlings, gluten, and similar grain by-products. Tankage for young pigs and meat scraps for chickens are high-grade proteins and are of animal origin.

It is no less important to get the necessary vitamins—those mysterious substances that keep the body healthy and promote growth and well-being. Scientists claim that many diseases are food-deficiency diseases—the body gets out of order because these peculiar vitamins are lacking in the food. Children require about one or two quarts of milk a day, fresh fruits, cereal breakfast foods, leafy vegetables as salads, and cooked vegetables.

Farm animals require the vitamins also. The legume pasture or hay, milk, grain concentrates when supplied in variety, pasture grass, and green forage crops are basic foods for farm animals. Very young animals should have milk also.

Let us next consider the carbohydrates. Sometimes the words starchy foods are used to describe the carbohydrates. You have long known forms of these in the white material of corn and of potatoes. The carbohydrates are formed of three elements—carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. The use of these carbohydrates is to furnish to animal bodies either heat or energy or to enable them to store fat.

In the next place, let us look at the fat in plant food. This consists of the oil stored up in the seeds and other parts of the plant. The grains contain most of the oil. Fat is used by the animal to make heat and energy or to be stored away in the body.

The next animal food in the plant that we are to think about is the mineral matter. The ashes of a burnt plant furnish a common example of this mineral matter. The animal uses this material of the plant to make bone, teeth, and tissue.

The last thing that the plant furnishes the animal is water—just common water. Young plants contain comparatively large quantities of water. This is one reason why they are soft, juicy, and palatable. But, since animals get their water chiefly in another way, the water in feed stuffs is not important.