PRODUCTION PER COW

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 3, Issue 259, 17 January 1941, Page 8

PRODUCTION PER COW

EFFECTIVE AVERAGE SOUGHT APPEAL TO FARMERS "Oil January K> all dairy farmers throughout the Dominion were being asked to supply the number of cows actually milked in their herds on the evening of January 15. The request for this information has come from the New Zealand Dairy Board and the scheme is part of the Board's Herd Improvement Plan, now in its second year of operation. "The chief object of this col leeLion of data is to arrive at a thoroughly practical bacis for assessing the average production per cow for the Dominion, and to do this it is necessary to know the number of cows annually milked on January 15 on all dairy farms. Then from data collected from the 5000 herds under Group Herd Test it is intended to convert this number of cows to the average number which would be carried on dairy farms throughout the season. This naturally means that the final figure vised for the average number of cows carried on dairy farms throughout the season will be greater than the number of cows milked in January, but the exact proportion will not be known until the data from 5000 herds under Group Test has beecn analysed. "When the final production figures h'ave been calculated on this new basis, not only will the dairy farmer have district figures of production for the whole Dominion, but the average per cow, production figure will be much more closely related to his practical farming conditions. "Some dairy farmers think thai this information might be used by Government Departments to check individual farmers' returns. The Dairy Board has indicated that individual returns will be treated as strictly confidential to the dairy "armers concerned,, and steps have leen taken to ensure that names of suppliers are not disclosed when the information is passed on by the lairy factory secretary,"