TESTING ESSENTIAL

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 August 1938, Page 3

TESTING ESSENTIAL

MODERN FARMING PRACTICE. No farmer can afford to milk in the dark. When high prices ruled, unprofitable cows could be fed and milked and losses from disease could be put up with. Testing every year, so that the full history of every cow and every calf may be known, is absolutely necessary if the best returns are to be secured. A thing to bear in mind is that with every year the value of successive records will be increased. It will be the cows boasting of a good record for every year of their producing life whose stock will command the big money. To give continuous heavy production and to have a calf every year is the proof of constitution and diseaseresisting power the farmer of the future will demand. Research workers on dairy cattle disease are showing—and practical local experience supports the view—that the worst diseases of dairy cattle are largely hereditary, and the best evidence that a cow has never had abortion or mammitis (in a serious form at least) is the unbroken succession of reCords. Herd-testing figures in the coming years will give the true of a cow from a producing as well as from a disease-resistant viewpoint, but only where the cow has been tested eVety year. Just as the continuous story that testing can provide will discover the most valuable breeding cows in the country so the herd-testing movement will divide farmers into two camps—one for the successful and one for the unsuccessful.