THE DUAL-PURPOSE COW.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 420, 1 February 1909, Page 5

THE DUAL-PURPOSE COW.

The English .paper "Tho Dairy" thus dfr'fends'tho dual-purpose cow:—"Those whb , keep themselves posted up on the ideas ori farming current m the United Stat'es "are i aware ;that on some pojnte wo on this side hold diametrically opposite .views. The dualpurpose cow is'one that'is held up to anathema in the 'American 'dairy"papers, ,land everyone is advised to avoid ( her and try to' breed somothing of a specifio dairy nature. ' ' Dual-purpose' is the American pnrase for aiming first at milk and then at fattening off a cow,for beef after her milking caieer | is closed. We in this country havo , long aimed at makiitg cows of.'thisfsort'J'.arid if we I have not yet succeeded'iri''developin'g ft'whole tainly had many individual successes.' Two of our breeds lend themselves particularly well to this dual-purpose, the shorthorn anij', the red-poll, and some facts about the former will be enough evidence for the present. The I pedjgreed shorthorn was in, the beginning bred /or, beef alone, and has the beef build, ' whilo'the unpedigreed animals were kept up for milk first, and fattened afterwards in the dual-purpose way. Within tho last -few yeare the Shorthorn' Society has offered prizes for pedigreed animals « with good milking powers, so as directly to encourago tho double type, and as a result year by year the milking powers of the competitors have been in- , creasing and creaping up on tho records of other breeds, until this year they have topped | the list. The champion milk cow at the Lon- , don Dairy Show was a pedigreed shorthorn, i 'Dorothy," belonging to Lord Hothschild. The point the writer wants to emphasise, ' however, is the 'fact : that this cow —which in effect is the champion of the British Isles* this year—is a dual-purpose cow with, perhaps, a century of beef-breeding behind her., andyet she yields milk better than dairy breeds like i the Jersey or the Ayrshire. Now, what'has been done with one animal can bo done in ' time with a hundred, and, it only needs the principle to be followed long enough, and-by ' a sufficient number, to make the dual-breed , a permanencv, notwithstanding all that our. American fellow-cowmen think to the con- i trary."