Calves and Concrete

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 476, 6 August 1948, Page 13

Calves and Concrete

Byz

SUNDOWNER

BACK TO ‘MILK

DON’T know whether the people of Christchurch drink more milk than they did a few years ago or whether they are just more numerous, but there are certainly more producers of milk

within an hours run of the city. If the number of dairy farms has not

increased, the number concentrating on milk instead of on butterfat and cheese seemed to have ‘increased so rapidly

that I found myself a stranger among them after an absence of less, than 10 years. I saw fewer Jerseys, and fewer cream-lorries, and I could not help thinking that the Jerseys there have already had their day. What woke me up to the change was, curiously enough, the bleating of calves in May. We are so much creatures of habit that I can spend days among cows in early spring without hearing the calves, but half-a-dozen calling out together as winter approached at once caught my attention and roused my curiosity. I had noticed how numerous the black-and-whites were over the fences, but it was only when I heard young calves calling from a shed that I began"to notice how many of these black-and-whites were in full milk and how many lorries’ there were on the roads loaded with cans. The calves, ‘I was told later, were not nearly as noisy as they should have been. It was so profitable selling milk that even the heifer calves were not often being saved. One man who seemed to be milking about 100 cows told me that his cheque for the month wéuld "come near a thousand," and although I thought he was stretching the figures a little, it was excitement and not lying or brag. I could easily understand, too, why he was not interested in calves. a *

COWS WITHOUT CALVES

HETHER competition will water these returns down it is too soon to say, but killing the calves must if

it continues too long. Calves mean work and a levy on the milk; later they mean grass and a hole in the hay; but

even ai Sscicice could make cows ~ milk without them, as science some day will. it would not

be good economy to kill them indis, criminately. And when that day dawns there will be very few to kill. The problem will be, not how to feed them

when they come, but how to keep them coming. For the farmer then will behave as he behaves to-day-he will hope that his neighbour will breed enough to keep the herds ‘going; and his neighbour will be just as foolish, as greedy, as feckless, and as lazy as he is. However, when I began to look at them, I thought that those calves which had been saved were getting better treatment than calves usually get in a country where every farmer is short of labour. They had shelter; and they were fed individually; not left to shiver behind wire fences and to fight for their quota in a common trough. * % *

MILK AND MECHANISATION

[tT seemed to me too that dairy-farm-ing is now as completely mechanised in the South Island as it is in the North, that it depends as heavily on electric power, and rests even more firmly on concrete. Professor Hudson told me

once that the justification for the costly byre at Lincoln College

was partly its efficiency and partly its power to make farmers think. He wanted, he said, to get it into their minds that nothing was good enough but the best possible in the country as well as in the city. If it was worth while spending tens of thousands of pounds on bank and shipping offices, if insurance companies found it good business to house their employees in palatial buildings, if no big business man would sit in a dark office or stand on a bare floor, it was worth . while spending a fraction of the cost of those city improvements on efficiency and comfort in the ‘country. In other words, farmers had to get their minds as well as their hands and feet out of the wet. and the cold and the mud. But I thought when I visited Mr. C. W/ Humm’s farm at Coldstream that the revolution had come; I don’t know how much money had been spent on his concrete fences and yards, on his: limitless water supply, or on his byre and cooling rooms. It would not be (continued on next page)

Through New Zealand To-day

(continued from previous page) nearly aS much as an insurance company would spend on premises in a one-horse town if there was a prospect of better business. But it was enough to make me think that milk production -except for the seven-day week and the 52-week year-can be as orderly, as comfortable, and almost as clean, as making clothes or running ships, and as far from the cow-spanking of 30 years ago as a limousine is from a dray. I was driven there by the Engineer to the Power Board who went to examine some proposed additions to the lighting system and at the same time estimate on a neighbouring farm the cost of an electrically operated irrigation plant. When I compared all this with the slush and gumboot days of my own youth I felt not merely that Professor Hudson was right, but. that his rightness had already been widely accepted. ; * * %

STUD FARMER

FROM C. W. Humm’s model dairy farm I went to E. S. Taylor’s model sheep farm, which I had not seen since 1936 and wanted to see again after 10 years in the North Island. I don’t know how it is with other people, but I find that

it is not. possible to carry a map in my mind for more than eight or 10

years and still reproduce it accurately. I have as good an eye for country as most people, but however intimate I think I am with a run or a farm or a landscape of any kind, I find, if F return to it after a long absence, that there are fences or gates or tracks in the wrong places, and that some quite prominent features have escaped me altogether. Even in the case of this small flat farm I had lost the landmarks to some extent, finding a creek on the south side which I had thought to be on the north side and a lane running at a sharp angle across the middle which I could not fit into my mental picture at all. I mention these inaccuracies not because they are interesting in themselves, or because I think they are curiosities,

but because I think that they are normal experiences usually denied. Much of the confusion in life, and a good deal of the friction, arises out of mental failings which we either do not recognise or recognise and refuse to acknowledge. I don’t think that Dr. Cook thought he had reached the North Pole. But I think that the man who tells me a story that I know I have told him believes that it is his own’story, arid that the man who loses a bigger fish than anyone else has ever seen at least believes in time that he once hooked Leviathan. Memory is wonderful until you cease suspecting it, and then it is an hourly menace. But to return to E. S. Taylor's Romneys and English Leicesters. I was sure when I saw the Romneys that they used to be Corriedales, and in this I was tight; but I was not right in thinking that he used to have. Southdowns as well, and that his Leicesters were carrying more wool on their faces and legs than the flock I had seen 12 years earlier. I was shown photographs which proved that where I thought there had been change there had been none, and that some things which I thought had not changed had in fact changed appreciably. I have always thought stud farming the most interesting but at -the same time the most exacting and worrying line of business to which a farmer can turn. If you don’t love your animals you will never get to know them, and if you can’t cast out your love as often as your eye detects a serious flaw you will never get a fixed and high standard. There is the problem too of spreading your affection evenly over two different .breeds-in this case over Leicesters and Romneys. I don’t think it is impossible, but I am sure that if I went into breeding myself I would concentrate on one breed and become hidebound and fanatical about it. It is fondness stopping short of fanaticism that makes a good judge, and I imagine that what keeps E. S. Taylor’s Leicesters on such a high, fixed level is the fact he has always had another breed to think about and look at; that Corriedales and: Romneys ,have corrected his vision for Leicesters, as looking away at intervals helps when we are using binoculars.