HEREFORD CATTLE HAVE HAD A LONG HISTORY

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 15, Issue 65, 5 July 1950, Page 7

HEREFORD CATTLE HAVE HAD A LONG HISTORY

Hereford herds are gaining in popularity in the Bay of Plenty and those farmers who run this breed will be in its early history, British sources tell us that Herefords have been bred for beef rather than- dairy purposes, though many cows prove to be good milkers. They are exceptionally hardy, which makes them particularly suitable for the wholly out-of-door life of the great ranges and stock farms overseas.

Free From Tb. They are remarkably free from tuberculosis. The Herd Book Society quotes a proof from Buenos Aires of this particular quality. Between 1903 and 1941, 1744 cattle were destroyed there because of tuberculosis at the quarantine station; of these, only 26 were Herefords.

They were first bred, say historians, in Elizabethan times, at WeobLey, Herefordshire. A man named James Tompkynys earned a permanent place in local annals as 'he father of 33 children, two of l.is sons justified world-wide repute by starting the Hereford breed on their farm near the village. Out of that local effort, so insignificant at the time, has swelled the temarkable fact that in the cattle lands of North America, from Canada to Mexico, the predominating breed is Hereford. It first went to the U.S.A. in 1817, v-hen .£lenry Clay took a young "bull, a cow and a heifer to his Kentucky home. From those three imigrants have sprung the millions —ninety out of every hundred cattle in Texas, for instance, are Herefords —that now roam the * U.S. ranges. Canada first knew the breed 90 years ago, when it was introduced by F. W. Stone, Guelph, i ntario. From North to South America was, relatively, only a step. The buyers of the Argentine, Uruguay and other Latin-American countries are regular and welcome visitors to the Herefordshire cattle sales, and they pay high prices for •he bulls. Now In Russia Twenty years ago or so, the qualities of the Hereford attracted the attention of the U.S.S.R. An Agricultural Commission from there bought 26 bulls and 46 heifers in 1928, made a larger purchase a few years later, and, by 1939, after exhaustive tests by her experts, Russia was buying. Herefords in great quantity.