Dairy Herd Improvement

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 52, 4 June 1948, Page 5

Dairy Herd Improvement

TESTING HISTORY IN N.Z. SURVEYED The Herd Improvement Association in New Zealand today is.a growing organisation with the avenues for its services increasing daily, said Mr N. Carter, secretary of the Bay of Plenty and East Coast Herd Improvement Association, in an address on the growth of that body to the weekly gathering of the Whakatane Rotary Club on Tuesday evening. - One of the first real steps in testing, Mr Carter continue, was taken in the Goodfellow factories in the Waikato in the early days. In this system, the factory sent out cases of test bottles to the farmers to be filled with milk samples. They also supplied the weights of milk produced by each cow. The fallacy of this method was the dishonesty of some farmers who would not give correct samples of milk or weights. The next method was the Group Testing scheme, whereby the farmers banded into testing associations and carried'out their own tests. Even this could not be accepted as a true and even testing method owing to the wide diversity of rules employed by each association. *

Later a New Zealand Federation of these Associations was formed and a fairly uniform set of testing rules was made. This was the first real step in the progress of testing in this country. In 1936 the New . Zealand Dairy Board took over the functions of the Federation and during the 193940 season the New Zealand Herd Improvement Association was formed, comprising six testing groups. The Bay of Plenty and East Coast Association has an area of from

Katikati to Wairoa under it§ jurisdiction, with 26 testing officers and one consulting officer in the field. These men have the important job of collecting data relating to cows, dairy production and dairy management. Their most important operation today is the Sire-Survey. This is being made to check whether or not the sire is improving the productivity of the progeny of the dams with which he is mated. This and all the other functions of the association are aimed at the building up of the production of the New Zealand dairy herds. “Today there are 19.2 per cent of the dairy stock in New .Zealand under the association and the numbers are increasing all the time,” Mr Carter concluded.