IN PRAISE OF THE JERSEY

Northern Advocate, 29 December 1934, Page 2

IN PRAISE OF THE JERSEY

AN ESSEX MAN’S LETTER

The following letter by an Essex farmer, appearing in a recent issue of “The Times,” London, though perhaps not applicable in all its phrasing to New Zealand, will no doubt be of general interest to dairymen of the Dominion who place their confidence in the Jersey Breed. Sir. —1 want to break a lance for the Jersey cow. Superstitions die hard, and the quaint one survives that the Jersey is the “gentleman’s cow." a park ornament, fragile and exotic. Another Dairy Show is over and. as usual, the breed has gone to the top. A Jersey won the National Milk Cup and a Jersey was Reserve. A Jersey won the Naional Butter Cup and a Jersey was reserve for that too. As for a rival breed from another island, where, oh. where were they? Why is it that prices at Jersey sales are. on the whole, so very bad and at Guernsey sales, on the whole, so very good? Two seemingly fantastic questions. I am thinking of pedigree sales, for at an East Anglian market sale in the summer I heard dairy farmers bidding better-than-pedigree prices for several unregistered Jersey heifers whose calving dates were neither stated nor known. It may be that those rival sales have been dispersal sales and that contrawise the Jersey sales have been collective ones to which (how shall I put it?) owners have not sent the cream of their stock. Perhaps the swagger Jerseys seldom appear in the sale ring; and, if for sale, are sold privately. Yet I remain disconsolate. The Jersey has a consistently unjust Press. For instance, there were 56 entries at the Dairy Show, the second highest number of any breed. Yet in one of the leading agricultural papers their report not only figures at the end (save for four Welsh Blacks), but occupies less space than those of Red Polls and Ayrshires (33), and the same space, believe it or not. as South Devons. As for Guernseys (31 entries), one notes that their breeders “have still to overcome a certain shyness.” This shyness is not, I repeat, reflected in sale prices. They must be very efficiently organised. Professor Boutflour says, both loud and clear, that a cow’s business is to give milk and not to look nice. He separates the producing cow from the show cow by a great gulf fixed. There is no such gulf among Jerseys. The beautiful Flashlight’s Josy, “the glass of fashion and the mould of form,” was also an Order of Merit cow. I do not mean that she wore a blue and crimson ribbon when Royalty was present (it would have become her), but that she gave, in three successive lactations, an amount of butterfat 50 per cent, above the Society’s Register of Merit standard. The lovely little Cowslip sth, winner on inspection at the Dairy Show, gave . 1,380 gallons in her last lactation. Ivy sth, Hamletta’s Mistress. Bollhayes May’s Sunrise —I could go on, but I don’t want to be a bore. A Shorthorn breeder sat on a bale of straw in my cowhouse one sunny after-

noon and watched my animals being milked and fed. “Is that all you give that one?” he asked as the nuts were put into her bowl. "How much is she giving?" I said: “Five gallons. She’s just had her second calf within 11 months of her first." The bale quivered beneath him and that night he rang up: Would we buy him a Jersey? He felt too old, he said, to start again with Jerseys, But one he must assuredly have. The Jersey comes into profit at two years old, needs a deal less to eat than the heavy breeds, and lives, with reasonable care, to a ripe age. My best cow’s dam was born during the battle of Arras and is in calf again. Once, greatly daring, I praised a rival breed to the cowman of an illustrious neighbouring Jersey herd. “I reckon,” he said, “that when a Jersey has lived 13 or 14 years and given you 10 or 11 calves and all that milk and cream' and butter, she don’t owe you much." The presses groan, with articles on milk, pure milk, clean milk. Wisdom abounds about bacilli, Grade A, the tuberculin test, accredited product.-) 0, compulsory pasteurisation. How little one reads about good milk, rich milk. Jersey milk. As to appearances, the Jersey’s a poem, A herd on a green field holds you gazing at them, keeps you at home for the holidays. Her eye—but I become lyrical. And, once again, I don't want to be a bore.

But here are a few facts loosely strung together. Let the wrath of the breeders of heavier cattle, meaty cows, fall on my amateur’s ( head. For then let the groat breeders of Jerseys, and the Society itself, in big guns, load, and, once and for all, let the public and Press hear the truth about this singularly beautiful animal.