SKIMMINGS

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1610, 7 January 1903, Page 67

SKIMMINGS

The industry is very active in the Bunnythorpe district. The Defiance Creamery has just installed another large Alpha-Baval separator to 'cope with its increasing supply. The splendid price of 9£d per pound of butter-fat which this concern paid its suppliers last month is no doubt responsible for tbs increasing patronage.

The RadiatorjiMparator, which converts milk direct ifitb butter, is apparently doing' excellent .work in the Auckland province. Butter made by the lightning process is selling in Auckland at lid per pound, and a line of butter stored for two months' in the local cool stores opened up in excellent condition showing practically no apparent deterioration. The first shipment made to London included both ripened and unripened butter, so the report on the shipmeut should be interesting reading. A radiator is shortly to be installed in a Defiance creamery in the Manawatu district, so that dairymen in the Wellington province will be able to see and judge for themselves of the machine's capabilities.

Palmerston is becoming the most important Ayrshire district in the colony. The extensive purchases of pedigree stock made by Mr S. Luxford, in Otago and Southland, have been emulated by Mr S. Standen. who lias just secured some of the most aristocratic Ayrshire blood in the South Island. One bull purchased was the celebrated Duke of York, an animal which has already carried off twelve championships. Over thirty head in all were purchased, the principal breeders supplying them being P. Ireland. of Goodwood, and D. McGregor and W. Meek of Oamaru. * * *• * *

Time is evidently discovering some weakness in the milking machine, as one or two which have heen working in Taranaki are not working so well as they did when first installed, and are being discarded. A complaint has been made that the milk from the buckets gets back into the tubes, but this is no doubt caused by carelessness in taxing the capacity of the buckets. The milkrt" machine is iust like many other ideas devised to take the place "of more natural means—it must have intellie-emf divee+ : ou. and demands eyeful control. It mav he automatic. but it cannot do good work unless it'has absolutely fair treatment. There is a rumour to the effect that a colonial machine is shortly to be put upon fhe market, which is an improvement on the La wren ce-Ken r ply. It this claim is true its advent will be welcomed.

In the * average co-operative creamery the butter maker is usually the only one connected with the enterprise who has trained or fitted himself for the business and frequently the success or failure or the creamery in his charge is dependent upon him. To fill his position successfully he should have fair knowledge of the " breeding and general management of dairy cattle. How to formulate balanced rations and. disposing of the by-products of the creamery are problems which the up-to-date buttermakers should be able to s<?lve. —Thomas Wittig.

If several kinds of food are placed before cows, they will select the kind first that is most palatable, and when satisfied will reject a large portion, which may be wasted. IVhen the foods are prepared, and made more palatable by the addition of ground grain to hay, straw or fodder, there will be less waste. During the winter the object should be to have the animal consume the least desirable foods as a matter of economy, and at the same time give them other foods in connection therewith that will c-enable the animals to gain, as it should not be satisfactory to have them simply to remain at the same weights. ****** A series of eight experiments recently demonstrated the advisability of keeping pigs on sows as long as possible, consistent with the healthy and strong condition of the mother. This for many reasons, chief of which is that a sow and her pigs together will extract more nourishment from a given quantity of food than will the weaned pigs alone. The sew and pigs were separately weighed each week, and any loss or gain of the sow was deducted from or added to the increased weight of the pigs. The pigs were allowed to remain on the sow for ten weeks, then a similar course of feeding was carried on with the pigs for seve.n weeks. The sow and pigs consumed on an average 231 pounds of meal and 534 pounds of skim milk in making a similar increase.—‘Taxmer’s Gnide .“

***** To discover what advantage there was,

if any, in wetting the meal for milk cows, Professor Grisdale selected two lots of cows, of three each, and fed them for seven days on similar rations. On the eighth day the rations were changed, both lots being fed silage and hay, but lot 1 being given a meal ration of bailey, oats and oil meal fed dry, and lot 2 a meal ration of bran and gluten, fed wet. These rations were continued for 14 days, when the rations were . interchanged. between the two lots, of cows. The results from equally good rations should, with such an interchange' 'of rations, have been quite similar. The results, however, show quite a disparity. The ration fed wet gave a daily aggregate of 114 pounds milk testing 3.83 per cent, butter fat, to 4.36 pounds butter fat, while the same cow's fed on the dry ration gave 116 1-2 ponnds milk, testing 3.99 per cent, butter fat, equivalent to 4.62 ponnds butter fat. an increase for the period nnder test of 2J pounds of milk; of .16 per cent, butter fat, and of .262 ponnds butter fat, an increase of 6 per cent, in favour of dry feed. • * .. * * * •

At the late meeting of the Fitchburg Milk Dealers' Association, the superintendent of the Haywood Farm at Gard-

M r, Mass., said that from carefully kept records he found that it cost last winter, 29£ cents a day to teed a cow giving milk, and 20 cents a day for a dry cow. His cows gave an average of 10i quarts a day, which sold at 30 cents per can (of 8£ quarts we suppose). He thought a ma.n could not make milk and sell •it at a profit for less than six cents per quart. This is very true if the quarts, or 2l£ pounds is a, fair average of the yield from his cows. This, if an average for the year, would be but about 7500 a year, which is too small a production for cows eating cents worth of food daily, which would bo about 107.68d01. worth a year. ‘We know of a herd, several of which produce about twelve thousand pounds of milk in a year, and the average all, from three years old to aged, is about ten thousand, pounds, and tho owner says the food given costs at market rates about 35d01. a year, but he saves something from that, because much of his feed is home grown. His milk is sold at a condensarv, and he averages about 100 dollars a year income from all cows over two years old, besides the value of tho calves raised There is either a great difference in cows or in their meat. His cows are well fed. but not forced for large production, and he knows how many pounds each cow gives at a milking after the calf is three days old, and knows how much food is given, of home grown as well as that bought.—• “Massachusetts Ploughman."

It costs money to support healthful activity in any living tissue in our domestic animals. Economy demands that all such tissue should be fulfilling a special purpose. Here is indicated one of- the leaks which, if stopped, would make the farmer's life more desirable than it is, and enable him to use hired labour more than he does. It secrus that some very small allowance might be made, as a rule for more complete utilisation of the nourishment digested and absorbed in the case of very fine beef blood tha,n in the case of dual-purpose blood. There is good beef blood and poor beef blood just as there is good dairy blood ancl poor dairy blood. Special excellencies of type must be considered. As a sound principle the animal ,tlxat individually and whose ancestry have been habituated to exceptional activity in certain tissues, whether these tissues be muscular or mammary, will utilise more of the manufactured nourishment in the blood current than in the case of animals where onlv a moderate activity has thus existed. This may be only a very small advantage indeed, and hard to measure; but it exists in theory, and as a rule, in practice.

“Hoard's Dairyman," the great cow paper of America, is no believer in crossing breeds to increase yields, and a correspondent to tire paper voices that opinion as follows: —"At a recent fair, tne writer was looking in a stall wherein were two very fine, pure bred dairy cows ux great promise. Anoiner looker-on Avas admiring them, but added, “What a magnificent cross they would make with the Holsteins. Don't you think so?" The exhibitor said to him, “What, do you want to spoil Avhat forty breeders have been trying for the last two hundred years to perfect? Your cross-bred coav will not be better than either of the tAVO breeds separate, and the next cross, you will be Avithout a coav, for nature Avill then have a pattern (?) so far out of line, that scrub Avill result." It was the old story over again. Improving race horse blood by adding a Clyde infusion, all of Avhich reminds us of Avhat Uncle Theodore Louis told a man the other day about some hogs that possessed the four breed mixture: My fader man, if you Avant hogs to just eat swill, these are the very hogs you Avant." While the owners of the black-polled cattle are not making any claims for their stock as special dairy cattle, they at the same time, are setting the dairyman, a valuable lesson in not miking the breeds, though I do know of a dairyman A\ r ith a well bred herd of Jerseys, who has now headed his herd with a black polled bull, so that he can sell their calves for veal and get something for them.

Dr Babcock, the inventor of the famous test Avhich bears his name, gave some interesting particulars of his invention to a recent meeting of dairymen at MilAvaukee, U.S.A. He said:—lt was nearly twenty years ago that he became impressed with the unjustness of the methods of the average creamery, in which all the milk from the cows of the different dairymen was mixed, the poor mixing Avith the good, and the man Avith the good coavs and the best milk failing to get a better price for his product that the man Avith tho poor cows, Avho generally, in addition, gave his creamery and milk but little attention. His attention was first attracted to the great difference in the results from the milk of different cows, by experiments conducted by him while he was chemist of the New York Experimental Station. “There," said Dr Babcock, “we had four fine cows which gave four pounds of butter, daily, but on experimenting with the milk from each coav we found that on 6 of them gave half the?butter and the other three the other half." From the investigation thus started as to the relative values of the milk of different cows those processes developed which led to the dis-

covery of the Babcock test, by which the losses in skim milk, poor milk, and whey are detected and a larger saving effected. “Following the invention of the test," said Dr Babcock, “a host of spurious imitations of the test were put on the market, all of which were cheap contrivances, and which discredited the test so that it was some time before its real value was, to be appreciated. Another fault found with it bv dairymen who did not know its true value was that it gave only the per cent, of butter fat in the milk instead .of estimating the butter yield."