FARM AND DAIRY.

Marlborough Express, Volume XXXVII, Issue 120, 23 May 1903, Page 2 (Supplement)

FARM AND DAIRY.

SINGLE GROSSING.

In a paper co the principles of crossing in stock breeding, a practical authority cornea to the conclusion that safety is only to be secured by adhering to the first cross. He adds :

Why is it that the first cross between pure breds often produces

animals of superior merit, even surpassing sire and dam, and why is the [ progney of their descendants as a rule so inferior ? Ficst, it must be borne in mind in crossing a Jersey with a shorthorn, for instance, that both thes3 animals are the result of at least 100 years of careful selection and breeding. They undoubtedly came from the same original ancestry —i.e., a very common sort that originally gave only enough milk to rear their young. What they do more than this may be called artificial. The same may be said of their conformation. The shorthorn of to day is the result of building, upon slight variationsgeneration after generation, and this type or conformation is held up to its present level only by constant, careful selection and breeding, and certain methods of feeding. The same is true of the Jersey.

Their training, however, has been in an entire opposite direotion. One to produce meat, the other butter, one to eat little and keep fat, the other to eat much and keep thin. The result is that when they come together the first cross seems to have stability enough to stand, and sometimes unite, the good qualitiea of both parents. But after this the blocd that the two have in common —i.e., their original type (a most ordinary animal) —prevails, and the result is that their offspring go back to these original first parents, or to where the two families separated, and they are not only common stock, but most inferior animals. la this respect they find a common level below ordinary farm stock.

In contemplating the desirability of cross breeding, we are apt to losa sight of the fact that in crossing two distinct breeds, such as the Jersey and shorthorn, or any other combination, by no process of breeding can one Jersey be added to one shorthorn and have one animal as the produot; two halves make a whole one and no more. The rery best thing to do is to cut the Jersey into a half and the shorthorn into a half; this, in the offspring, makes not two whole ones, but half-breds. Looking at it in this light, we have no. right to expect anything but grades as the result. It has taken over 100 years to build the shorthorn and Jersey to their present standard of excellence, but so frail are their acquired characteristics that it only takes about nine months (the period of gestation) to reduce them both to their original types, or to something worse. In this, therefore, we have a, very fair summing up of the whole matter, and the moral is to stick to the first cross, by always going back to the pure types, and avoiding a perpetuation of breeding from the crossed progeny.