An Ideal Milk-Producing Strain.

King Country Chronicle, Volume III, Issue 121, 11 January 1909, Page 3

An Ideal Milk-Producing Strain.

A writer in the "Farmer and Stockbreeder" relates his experience in the buildinp up of a rich producing herd of dairy cattle. He states: "Every farmer knows that there age many cows which get quite beefy by August on grass alone. True, they* fost less to winter, but that is not the point. What we want is a cow that will fill the bucket, and at the height of her \ production keep herself lean unless j helped with artificial food. I rememI ber one such I had and she required 1 cake all the first year after calving. She rarely took the bull that year, and 1 I was never able to get her in calf that season. In six years she had three calves and milked a year and nine month* between each. The second summer on grass alone she easily beat over twenty newly calved cows in the same shed. She was a bought calf out of a poor country, and showed one what was possible before I began to try to breed entirely for milk. A first cross, such as the Shorthorn-Guernsey, has been, in my experience, the nearest approach to the ideal milk producer. But we cannot with animals that only produce one heifer calf in two years, find enough of these. For if we bought pure Guernseys and bred from them we should only have one generation of first crosses; after which, by using a bull of a third pure breed, we might get some excellent 'recrosses, but we have to stop at that or the successors would degenerate into mongrels, not equal to modcrtae pure-breeds. Such a system would be essentially chance work, as one would have to depend upon bought cattle of such purity that they are bound to transmit to their descendants this inherent tendency to wards milk production. The majority of the cows in Denmark are of a dark red colour, and of a rather low set type. Many *of them are not at all symmetrical in form or pleasing to the eye, but they are of a pronounced dairy type, being deep bodied, with a good capacity for digesting large quantities of food and turning it into milk. They also possess the very desirable wedge-shape, narrow in front and wide and spacious behind. They have, as a general rule, thin clean thighs, with fine bone, and a fairly good udder with good teats. The teats are in most case not very large, but of good length. The udder has a soft silky touch and is not fleshy, and it milks down well. The average yield per cow is 6000lbs. of milk, and about 2001b. of butter fat, which is probably an average of 50 lbs. butter fat higher than in New Zealand-