. Cyclopedia of farm animals. Domestic animals; Animal products. CATTLE CATTLE 319 Skimmed-milk calves, although thinner at wean- ing time, are sometimes sold as baby-beef if well fed until sixteen or eighteen months of age. Heifer calves are preferred because they seem to take on flesh earlier than do male calves. In fact, the use of heifers for baby-beef production is the best solu- tion of the heifer problem, because young heifers are discounted at the markets much less than are older heifers often well along in pregnancy. Long yearlings. Fattening long yearlings,— cattle eighteen to twenty
. Cyclopedia of farm animals. Domestic animals; Animal products. CATTLE CATTLE 319 Skimmed-milk calves, although thinner at wean- ing time, are sometimes sold as baby-beef if well fed until sixteen or eighteen months of age. Heifer calves are preferred because they seem to take on flesh earlier than do male calves. In fact, the use of heifers for baby-beef production is the best solu- tion of the heifer problem, because young heifers are discounted at the markets much less than are older heifers often well along in pregnancy. Long yearlings. Fattening long yearlings,— cattle eighteen to twenty-three months old,—promises to be a popu- lar method of producing beef on farms having an abundance of good summer pasture. It is a method less to the extreme than baby-beef production, yet having to some degree the same advantages, notably, larger gains per food consumed and quicker returns than are made by keeping cattle until older. It is ahead of baby-beef production in that more beef is made from hay and grass and the final weight represents a relatively smaller consumption of grain. Taking it for granted that the calves are born in the spring, they are given little or no grain before or after weaning from the pail or the cow, as the case may be. A luxuriant growth of grass is depended on for the fall months, and when winter sets in the calves are supplied with a small allowance of grain in addition to a liberal feed of hay. It is intended that such calves shall be given pasture without grain the following summer and a full feed of grain the next fall and winter. With such a course mapped out for them, it would seem that the winter ration should be such as to make their going on pasture the following summer a pleasure rather than a hardship. This would not be accomplished were a heavy winter grain ration dropped when the cattle go on grass. In this connection, the results of a test made at the Nebraska Experiment Station with fifty grade Hereford calves averaging 500 p
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