THE PROBLEM OF RICHER MILK

Waihi Daily Telegraph, Volume XXX, Issue 8530, 19 October 1933, Page 2

THE PROBLEM OF RICHER MILK

VARIATION IN BREEDS INTERESTING EXPERIMENTS The secret of why cows of certain breeds always produce rich creamy milk and cows of other breeds never do Is believed to have been solved. The problem hitherto has been one of the most baffling of all scientific questions on farming. Although the scientists of the National Institute for Research in Dairying (attached to Reading University) are unwilling to claim complete certainty, they are about to publish In a paper the results of their months of work, which they hope offer the solution.

According to their theory, the reason why Guernsey cows, tor instance, are famous for their creamy milk, while shorthorn cows are reputed to give comparatively poor milk lies in the typical blood of each breed. The amount of cream varies with the proportion of diffusible calcium of sodium in the blood of the animal.

CHANGING COW'S BLOOD "Presently,” one worker told an interviewer, "we hope to change the blood of a cow to see if the quality of her milk changes accordingly. Unfortunately, it is difficult to keep the blood of animals changed for long, so that she would soon go back to her old style of milk. It is hard at present to see how we could raise the cream content of ordinary milk by permanently altering the blood of the cows that produce It. "But If our theory la confirmed, it will be of considerable scientific importance, and would, for instance, be a valuable guide in breeding cattle to produce richer milk. You would breed them to have the necessary type of blood. One might even be able to explain a good many of the differences between goat’s milk and cow’s.” MAKING MILK RICH The discovery, incidentally, will greatly forward the work of the institute, which aims at making cow's milk as rich and health-giving as possible throughout the year.

Research into the effects of temperature, rainfall, season, feeding, and management (cruelty, for instance, has an extraordinary adverse effect on milk) to make such an improvement possible, was seriously hampered when no explanation could, be given why one breed of cows always gave more cream than another.