CULLING NECESSARY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 July 1940, Page 9

CULLING NECESSARY

BREEDING OF STOCK. “Breed, feed and cull” is a slogan the soundness of which is becoming more and more appreciated as intensified competition, restricted markets and higher costs yearly make the occupation of livestock farming more difficult from a profit-making point of view. On high-priced land, with costly labour and rising taxation, there is no margin of profit to be won from the ill-bred beast, which requires similar outlay in attention and feeding as the well-bred producer, but makes a poor return in products, progeny or price. But if well-bred animals —and that means high-producing, and not necessarily show animals —are kept, it pays not only to feed them all they eat, but to make certain that their food is "balanced.” That is, that it lacks nothing the stock may require, yet contains no excess which will be wasted or devoted to other purposes than maintenance of production or reproduction. Even in the most carefully bred and efficiently fed herds and flocks, there are invariably individuals which are below the average, although they may be generally classed as good stock. It pays to cull these “tail-enders" outwhenever it is possible to replace them with better. Culls can be detected in the dairy herd by4esting and progeny recording; in the piggery by litter recordings; in the flock by keeping a detailed record of the individual performance in fleece weight and quality, prolificacy, carcase qualities and rate of growth of lambs to maturity of every ewe; and in the poultry flock bj’ trap nesting. The day when selection by eye was a “near-enough” method of picking out the culls has gone, and there should be no regrets for. at best, it was only a “guessing” method. In its place we must have records of performance, for it is only performance which counts with the man who must farm for profit.