HERD BUILDING

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19346, 27 June 1925, Page 8

HERD BUILDING

IMPORTANCE OF THE HERD SIRE. Writing in the Journal of Agriculture, Mr. W. M. Singleton. Director of the Dairy Division, says: There are two safe methods of building a dairy herd: one is to buy in cows of suitable type and authenticated yield; the other is to begin with cows or heifers and a proven sire, or one backed by butterfat records, and to build gradually by culling out the low producers and breeding from the highyielding cows of suitable type. To continually buy in new stock requires more finance than many of our dairyfarmers can afford. Then again, few dairymen will sell their best cows unless they are past their prime, so that the purchaser is continually confronted with difficulties, and may sometimes find he is accumulating a herd of culls. The butterfat-record-sire method is perhaps a slower one, but it is to be recommended. And, further, for quickest and most satisfactory results the sire should be a purebred.

The certificate-of-record system of testing has now been conducted in New for a 365-day milking-period. C.O.R. t sting has now been conducted in New Zealand for some thirteen years, land it is advocated that for grade and crossbred herds the sire be selected from C.O.R. dams. It is proved that for several generations certain females can give outstanding yields, then it is a reasonable assumption that by mating a bull from such dams with ordinary herd cow’s the resultant offspring should be an improvement on their dams. When selecting the sire the pedigree should be studied from the point of view of production of ancestors on both sides of the family, and productions of recent members should be given more importance than those of several generations back. The length of time that C.O.R. testing has now in existence in New Zealand enables selectors to obtain full information in many cases for several of peditions of pedigree. Next to production comes the question of type and, although yield is of major importance, the selected sire should conform to accepted standards of true dairy type, and should possess the desirable characteristics of a herd sire.'

There is a tendency among dairymen to use a sire for a reason or two and then sell or destroy him. The true test of a sire is the quality of his daughters. If they arc an improvement over their dams from the point of view of production, and do not retrogress in type, then it may be accepted that the sire is a success. Not until the daughters bcfcir living testimony to the inefficiency of the sire should he be destroyed. The advantage of a purebred over a crossbred sire is considerable. Experiment has proved that with a purebred bull a breeder is likely to achieve more in two generations than in five generations with a grade bull threequarters pure. INFLUENCE OF THE PUREBRED DAIRY SIRE. As previously stated, the true test of a sire’s worth is the quality of his daughters. It is difficult to get herd-

testing-association figures on this phase of the subject, as our records do not include any information with respect to pedigree. From our records, however, have been collected sixteen instances where both daughter and dam have association records, the daughters haved been sired by O, purebred butter-fat-record bull. Their sixteen daughters have improved on the average production of her dam. These two daughters were two-year-olds; one produced only 31b of butterfat less than her dam, and the other 21b. less. Doubtless, at ages equal to that of the dam these two daughters would show a higher yield. The sixteen dams were sired by eleven different bulls, so thnf the examples are fair, and the improvement cannot be attributed to the influence of one or two outstanding dams. Moreover, only two sires are presented, so that it may safely be assumed that the improvement has come from the male sid£

Another example is the case of five different dams from a different sire, and mated with a butterfat-record bull. These five dams, at an average ago of 8 years 87 days at commencement of test, yielded an average of 441.361 b butterfat. Their five daughters, each from the butterfat-record hull, yielded at an average of one year 347 days, 624.771 b butterfat, an average increase of 183.41 lb. The fact that the aver-

age production of the five dams was already very creditable, and that the average age of the daughters was low, makes this example an outstanding one. These figures are quoted • from our C.O.R. returns to show what is possible if the right sire is chosen. What if more, the success of this particulai sire was a more or less natural cxpcc tation owing to the information which his butterflat-record backing supplied, He was line-bred to an outstanding bull of the breed, and, apart from this, the other animals figuring in the pedigree were for several generations back of proved outstanding merit. LENGTH OF MILKING-PERIOD. Statistics show that the average cow on association test in New Zealand milks about 230 days. It is safe tc assume that the average lactation for all cows in the country is less. The writer has frequently expressed the opinion that the season of the average dairy cow in New Zealand is too short. Even on the basis of 230 days it means that there are more than four months in which our average dairy cow is doing nothing in butterfat-production. During the period she requires bodily maintenance, and general charges bearing on the cost of the cow’s keep continue much, as during the milkingperiod. Two months’ rest from milkproduction should be sufficient.