DAIRY COWS

Wairarapa Age, 20 November 1919, Page 7

DAIRY COWS

INTERESTING EXPERIMENTS. For the past five years two of the officers of the Kentucky (U.S.A.) experiment station, have made careful notes of the escutchnms of dairy cows. First, they studied Guenon's *ook, which received more or less endorsement in 1884 from the French Academy of Science. Guenon proved to Mb own satisfaction that escutcheon of certain types and sizes wore corelated with high milk and butter production. During the five yearn Messrs" J. J. Hooper and J. W. Whitihou'se gathered data on 1019 dairy cows, with the result that their studies did not confirm Guenon's ideas, as they did not find that milk and butter production kept paco with the size and length of the escutcheon. They found that most milch cows had relatively !arge escutcheons, but one was not to be condemned if her escutcheon was relatively small, foi? some of the best record cows they inspected had only medium escutcheons. None of their work confirmed Guerdon's theory, and they had been convinced that the size and shape of the escutcheon were of little or no importance in the selection of a dairy cow. In making these studies they also noted the secretions. Some of the poorest milking oows had the most abundant secretions,, and some of the world's reoord cows they had observed did not show much secretion. They could not find any corelation between quantity of secretions and the quantity of milk and fat produced, al£nough a cow showing an abundance of yellow body secretions ordinarily would produce yellow fat.