How to Select Cows: or, The Guenon system simplified, explained, and practically appliedHazard, Willis P. (Willis Pope)
Science
How to Select Cows: or, The Guenon system simplified, explained, and practically applied
Hazard, Willis P. (Willis Pope)
Cattle -- Judging; Cows; Dairy cattle
The ten 200 pound butter cows, in ten years would pay a profit of $1,957
30. If the ten cows bred from them, by using the 400 pound butter bull,
would make half as much again butter at the same cost, the general
product would be increased by one half, and leave the sum to be deducted
for keeping the same, for if the two year old 200 pound butter heifer
could be raised for $30, so could the better bred one. The profit on
each of them, deducting $54 18, cost of cow, will be $484 64—on the ten,
$4,846 40, and on the 200 pound butter cows, the profits would be $1,957
30. The advantages reaped by the farmer who has the product for ten years
of heifers bred by using the better bull, will be $2,889 10 more than on
the 200 pound butter cows.
If he paid for his bull $1,500, and the bull and all his cows died at
twelve years old, the farmer would be as well off as he would have been
to have used the 200 pound butter bull.
But there is no necessity of paying $1,500 for a 400 pound butter
bull. One hundred dollars will buy a Jersey bull, six weeks old, from
a 400 pound butter family, and he will be old enough to use in twelve
months. The $100 paid for him, at six per cent. compound interest,
would amount to $191 61, in eleven years. The profit on ten butter cows
making three hundred pounds over the ten cows making two hundred pounds
in ten years, being $2,800, by deducting the $191 61 for the bull that
produced them, (counting nothing for the 200 pound butter bull, for he
is good-for-nothing,) the actual advantage reaped by the farmer with
intelligence and enterprise enough to secure the better bull, in the ten
years after his heifers come in, is over $2,500 on the butter alone. The
animals are counted of no value when twelve years old, as the price got
for those living beyond that age would average to pay only for the losses
caused by accident to animals before reaching that age. These figures
take no account of the skim-milk or buttermilk, for they are nearly
the same in either case, and will pay the taxes and for the care of the
animals; but there is one very important source of profit that is not
reckoned, and that is the extra value of the progeny, which is shown by
the following table, to be $17,424 48.
There must be no mistake made in procuring a Jersey bull calf.
Although, as a breed, they are twice to three times as valuable for
butter as common cows, yet any farmer who buys or uses a Jersey bull,
because he is a Jersey bull, will sorely repent his venture.
Buy a bull only from the very best families of Jerseys. They are cheaper
than the gift of an average good one.
The idea that it costs more to keep Jersey cows than common cows, or that
Jersey cows will not take on flesh, for beef, as readily as other breeds,
is true in one view, and very erroneous in another and more correct one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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