One of the fundamental truths in stock-raising, and in profitable milk production, is, that it takes a given amount of food to support the animal’s existence in such a way that it will simply maintain its status; and that growth in flesh or yield in milk, above an evenly balanced existence, must come from the food given to cause an increase of weight in flesh, fat, or milk products. Hence, all the profit must come from that excess, and is large or small just in proportion as the animal is capacitated to utilize and digest it, within the bounds of healthy, judicious feeding. So that farmer was sound who, when he fed up to the very verge of that limit, and was told by a skeptic that he did not believe high feeding paid, replied he was only sorry that his cows could not healthfully digest more. The capital invested in the cows, in the soil, in the barns and stables, in the care and time devoted to milking and waiting on them, is very nearly the same, whether they produce 3,000 pounds each per season, or 5,000 pounds. At first it may be granted that if a farm is stocked to its capacity in feeding a herd of 3,000-pound cows, that some outside food must be imported from other soil to enable the same herd to yield 5,000 pounds each. But the enriching of the manure through high feeding, and the consequent enriching of the land, will soon obviate the necessity of the importation of outside food. If this is not true, I admit that my opinion is based on false premises; and that the opponents of high feeding have the best of the argument, as well as a majority of the disciples, and a majority of the thinly-covered bones of the so-called dairy stock of the State. In support of the idea that there is an added value to the manure through high feeding, it may be stated that there are many places in the Eastern States in which in estimating the earnings of the cow each year, that the milk, or butter and cheese, the calf and the pork are not only counted, but $10 per well-fed cow is added for the increased value she has put upon the soil, deposited it in a bank that never breaks. What is true of the old East is fast becoming true of the soil of the older settled portions of Wisconsin. To augment the productive capacity of a given number of acres, that will now support in semi-starvation a given number of cows, to a point in fertility that will add 2,000 pounds of milk per annum to each cow, milk worth, say $20, is to have the funds in hand to pay the sum of $400 as interest on the added value to an ordinary farm of eighty acres that is made to well keep twenty cows, instead of keeping them in the usual way. Four hundred dollars will pay 5 per cent interest per annum on an added value of $100 per acre to the farm. This can be done without adding a cow to the herd. All done by a simple expansion, through better use of the capital already in the hands of many who work on the semi-starvation plan.