AGRICULTURAL.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 2, Issue 104, 10 March 1879, Page 2

AGRICULTURAL.

(From the Canterbury Times) TREATMENT OF HEIFERS. Upon the treatment of heifers with their first calf depends very much the quality and value of the future cow. This is not so_ often considered as it should be. The milking habit is a matter of education and training, and one can make or mar his cows by the manner in which he manages them. When young, the custom now is to bring a heifer into milking before, or very soon after, it is two years old. It is then more plastic in its owner's hands than if older and more fully grown. It is immature, and therefore not able to bear the strain of frequent maternity, nor to attain its proper growth, unless well fed with proper food. A habit of longcontinued milking, too, can only be fastened upon the young animal by postponing the second pregnancy for some months longer than is usual with an older animal. It is thus best not to permit a heifer to bear a second calf until 18 months after the first one. The milking period is thus lengthened out to 16 months in place of 10, as is usual, and / this habit of continuous milking becomes -v fixed. The heifer should also bo fed plentifully with nutritious food, so that it may be enabled to continue its growth and to produco milk copiously. As long as milk can be drawn from the udder, this should be done, if it is only a pint at each milking The continued manipulation of the udder in the act of milking tends to stimulate the secretion, as, in fact, it will do with a virgin calf, as has actually happened in numerous cases in which the suction of other calves, or the playing at milking by children with pet calve 3, brought them to milk at ages from seven to ten months, and before they have been old enough to breed,