IMPROVE THE CREAMERY

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1689, 21 November 1925, Page 8

IMPROVE THE CREAMERY

Splendid progress has been made in the manufacture of creamery butter in the U.S. during the last few years. Not all of our difficulties have been taken

care of, however, and it seems to me that perhaps the greatest opportunity for improvement now lies not so much with the creamery itself as with the dairymen who furnish the product received at our creameries, and the methods they use in producing the product.

It is the foundation of our industry that needs our greatest attention. It i s the 2G million dairy cows and the ■five million farmers and their families who care for these cows that need some of our attention now. The ave-

rage gross income from each cow in the United States last year was only 100 dollars. Out of this must be paid the feed and housing, care and milking of the cow... When all of these are paid, the rest is the profit. Not all of you are concerned with the average cow, perhaps, but there are cows in every community that are not satisfactory, and it is my purpose to-day to tell you something about these cows on our farms in this country, which is needed in the way of improvement.

When we realise that the average cow of this country produces only about 17011 s. of 'butterfat a year and that it is easily possible to develop herds with cow s that give twice that quantity we 'wonder why improvement is so slow. It requires the same barn space, the same work in feeding and for cleaning the 'barn, the same general overhead, and the same amount of labour for milking a cow that produces ,1701bs. of butterfat a s it requires for one that produces twice that much. The only difference.is the slight additional feed required to produce the extra amount of milk, or fat, and this is not great. Upon the amount of production, more than any other factor, depends the cost of production. In other words, the efficiency of the dairy largely depends upon the amount of production of the individual cow. Many of you know that it is not difficult and does not require a very long time, through proper selection and breeding, to develop the kind of cows we ought to have on our farms, DUt we are not using the best means we have of doing this, and that is through the use of good '.bulls. It is rather a startling fact that even to-day it is necessary to visit as many as ten, and in .many cases 20, farms in the communities in which you have creameries to find one (purebred bull. Good bulls are not expensive; they cost no more to keep than poor ones. Without this one step our progress will be greatly retarded.

What are we going to do about it? Are we going to continue to use bulls, good, tad and indifferent? I say no. We must get rid of the inferior and mediocre sires and use to the limit the sires that improve our herds. To put this work across in a big way we must all pull together. We need your help. Now we have the facts in the case. Using these facts a s our weapons let us move forward and we can easily double the average production of our dairy .cows. The lesson from this is to select profitable cows- to breed and to use good purebred bulls. In this way we soon build up a more satisfactory foundation to this industry. It is easy to increase production of our average cows when we use purebred bulls of reasonably good breeding and witli ancestry of satisfactory production, and when we succeed in getting our average cow up to 3001bs. of ■tutterfat a year other problems will confront us. But our need now is to get cows that average 300 lbs or more.