NOTES ON RURAL TOPICS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2371, 10 August 1899, Page 5

NOTES ON RURAL TOPICS.

lA.t the time of writing it is raining hard, and reducing the depth of snow Work for Wet that .has been lying all over Weather. the interior of Otago for some weeks, and as all field work Ss at a standstill it may be of us© to draw attention to some of the jobs that can be done at such times. It is a good thing to have a Jarge granary or barn on every farm in which jobs can be found under cover in bai weather, such as dressing seed corn, mending sacks, 1 making oag sheets, mixing grass seeds and j dressing same, mixing manures at turnip-sow-ing time. Then there are various other things that ace always requiring attention—oiling the harness of the draught horses, overhauling machinery, cutting potato sets, but if this ss done long before planting time it is necessary to shake lime over the cut sides of the sets, or they will lose much of their sap and shrivel up. A man handy with carpen- ! ter s tools can always find broken gates to mend and hurdles to make, and for this purpose there should always be a supply of suitable timber kept on hand under cover. In fact there is always plenty of work to be iound to do on a farm in any kinds of wea- ' sther if work is wanted, and in broken weather ' svhen not actually raining, there are many i things that can be attended to, which, if not ' done in a slack time, will be neglected altogether. E had just posted my note on "Weigh the nfiv wl, a & lk and Cull the 6° ws " Milk Tally (Witness, July 27), when I of a received through the editor Good Little a letter from Mr MaunC<m. sell, who, though settled in the North Island for some years, is still well remembered in Otago, about the milk tally of a good little cow. I think it is a pity that dairy farmers and others interested do not more frequently send in simi3ar information about the milk yield of their cows for the purpose of comparison. I was .very pleased to get Mr Maunsell's letter and milk tally, and I hope he will get some good iheifer calves from the little cow he mentions. 'As he says, it is remarkable how the tally (varies at different periods. She suddenly jdropped to 11£ quarts on August 24, and then ntimped up to 17 quarts a month later. The low tally referred to may have been, owing Ito the *act that the cow was in season at that time, and therefore in an unsettled condition. Notwithstanding the variations in the ideld, it is a wonderfully good tally for the 12 months. The first measure was taken on

July 14, 1898, and on that day she gave 15£ quarts ; 12 months later, on July 12, 1899, she gave 10£ quarts. Now the mean of those two quantities is 13 quarts, and that, I think, is about a fair average for the year. The table shows a record for 363 days, and at 13 quarts per day she gave 4719 quarts, eoual to 1180 gal, which is a wonderfully good yield. At 101b per gallon, her season's output weighs 11,8001b, which is about 12 times as heavy us her own live weight. I have said that her first and last yield in the tally averages 13 quarts, and I find that adding all the tallies together and dividing by the number of times (27), tho average then works out to within a fraction of 13 quarts for the whole period. Therefore at that rate 11,8001b is about the weight of her output in milk. The Danish butter yield is estimated to be 281b milk to make lib of buttei, and at that rate Mi Maunsell's cow would make 421b of butter per season. In 1897 the report of the National Dairy Association of New Zealand stated that the average yield of milk per season from cows supplying the factories was 330ga1, and here we have a cow of ordinary colonial crossbred type giving nearly four times the averages yield. If there are many as good as that, there must be a lot of awful duffers to bring the average down to 330ga1. In my note about weighing the milk in order to cull the cows, I pointed out that the dairyman was very much deceived in his estimate of his cows, and the one he thought his best turned out to be four places down the list in the weighing test, and I remarked that some cows deceive the owner by giving a tremendous lot of milk fof a time and then falling off considerably, whereas other less showy cows keep up a substantial flow the whole season. Now, here in Mr. Maunsell's cow is a case in point. She did not start off with 20 quarts per day at first, and then tumble down to half that in a month or two, but just kept a good steady and consistent flow of milk right through the year, and that is the way to make a big total. It would have been more convenient if Mr Maunsell had weighed the ■*■ milk instead of measuring by Comparison. quarts and pints. It is all done by weight nowadays, and when the weight of the bucket is known, it is a very simple matter to hang it on the hook of a spring balance, deduct weight of bucket, and dot down the weight of the milk. At a trial of milkers held in Belfast a few months ago, lha first prize-taker was a crossbred cow. breeding \mknown. She gave 1151b of milk in two days, 58lb the first day and 571b the second, equal to about 23 quarto. Her butter fat average wae only 3.26 per cent., while the milk of a Jersey cow that only gave seven quarts per day averaged 4.77 per cent, of butter fat. Twc years ago I drew attention to a herd of cows kept by the Duke of Westminster at Ms Home farm in Cheshire. The cows were just an ordinary cross between shorthorn and Cheshire, and vet the 48 cows in the dairy averaged 6oogal pei cow per season. Seven of them ? a^iS or ? tllan 100 °S al > ranging from 1026 gal to 1482ga1. One of the Duke's cows has given an average of lOOOgal for six consecutive years, aiiother a like amount for five years, and the best milkers in the herd at the time I mention were the aged cows— that is, those about seven, eight, and nine years old. I should like to have a few like Mr Maunsell's little crossbred cow, as she will probably keep up a similar yield for some years with good treatment. Mr Maunsell refers to the jute stack covering , * -x , wheels which were mentioned Jute Stack by me in the autumn. I was CoTerings. told about these jute sheets y by a shareholder of the Canterbury Farmers' Co-operative Association, and he subsequently informed me that there was such a demand for them that the stock of jute was exhausted in a short time, and therefore no more can be obtained until next season. AGRICOLA.