MOUMOHAKI EXPERIMENT STATION.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 352, 12 April 1911, Page 3

MOUMOHAKI EXPERIMENT STATION.

EXTENSION OF ITS DAIRYING PHASE. The Minister .tor Agriculture, the Hon. T. Mackenzie. made an announcement at New Plymouth the other day which should prove gratifying news to the Taranaki dairy farmer. It was his pleasure to announce, he said, that they were about to establish an excellent breed of Ayrshires at Moumahaki. If this means anything it means the utilisation of this fine model State farm for its most useful and suitable objective—a dairy experimental station. In the hands of the present manager—Mr Primrose McConnell, it should become of very great value to the dairy farmers of the big butter-fat province. There is no better breed for the bulk of our dairying country than the Ayrshire, not the show Ayrshire which is the type of the breed New Zealanders are acquainted with, but the utility Ayrshire, in which the undoubted milking characters of the breed have been developed by pursuance of the true policy of breeding according to performance. No breed of domestic live stock in the world —except it be certain types of poultry —has suffered so much from a utilitarian point of view as the Ayrshire by the mad striving after fancy points, and this in a country, Scotland, where keen common sense usually distinguishes the men of thf> nation. The reason has been that prior to the introduction of the testing of cows for their annual production it was the showyard winner which commanded big money, and it therefore paid to breed according to fancy ideals of the ciay. Now, however, reason is asserting itself and it is the cow that is noted for the value of her product that is in demand. Splendid work is being done in Scotland by men of the new school, a very capable exponent of which we recently had in our midst in the person of Mr James Dunlop, the Scottish Agricultural Comissioner. The Hon. Mr Mackenzie's decision to establish the true Ayrshire at Moumahaki will be rgatifying news to Mr Dunlop, who was palpably disappointed that in a country such as this, with its best possibilities from a milk production standpoint, the milk record Ayrshire was not to be found. [n Mr McConnell the department has a man from whom great, things may be expected in dairy herd management: He has had exceptional experience of heavy milk producing stock in Britain, in fact he was probably the first tenant farmer in the Old Land to adopt the tuberculin test. He has also the true research spirit, and is therefore well fitted to take up the development of a herd on sound lines —breeding according to pedigree of performance, bo that the young bulls which will be available for farmers in the future will have the only pedigree which matters —the actual milking records of the female ancestry. Then for the first time in the history of the Ayrshire in this country it will be possible for a man to secure a sire which will advance with certainty the standard of his herd. Some of the foundation cows of the new State herd will be good types of the milking Ayrshire—so far, that is, as appearance goes—which the department recently secured from the Sunnyside Mental Hospital at Christchurch, the last of the herd of the breed maintained at that institution for many years. Altogether the new policy of the Minister for Agriultcure in regard to Moumahaki is one of the most important of the several forward movements initiated of late years in regard to the experimental activity of the Department of Agriculture. —^