Lack of Artificial Dairying Foods

The Tumut Advocate and Farmers & Settlers' Adviser

23 August 1910

We desire to ask our dairymen a serious, pertinent question –

"Are you going to allow the dairying industry to languish just because of your disinclination to grow enough artificial feed to carry the cows over the hard parts of the year?"

The cows, for the large part, have been carefully selected, and the fact that several seasoned dairymen - and some of them owners of large herds - are giving up dairying, indicates an unsatisfactory condition of affairs that may grow in seriousness if a corrective is not applied.

If the bottom were to fall out of the dairying industry, what kind of a town would Tumut degenerate into, in a business sense?

The answer is contained in the condition of the town prior to the adoption of dairying - empty houses and empty pockets.

Of course there is enough business and farming enterprise in existence here to prevent dairying going to the dogs, but it is our desire to see matters on the improve instead of the down grade.

If there is talk in the spring of big dairymen going out of the industry, anything might happen in the winter.

The most popular of the artificial dairying foods is of course lucerne, but since the conditions here are not favorable to its growth, all dairy men should grow broadcast maize, sorghum or other suitable emergency food for the cows.