24 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



cent solids and 3 per cent fat. You would make more money 

 by handling that breed of stock which would give milk that just 

 passed the standard, provided you were selling in the open 

 market. But if you were shipping milk to some private con- 

 cern, willing to pay you proportionately more for the high per- 

 centage of solids and fat contained in the Jersey and Guernsey 

 milk, that would be a different question. In the open market, as 

 most milk is sold, it would not pay you to keep the grade of stock 

 that gives the smaller quantities and the higher quality. 



If, on the other hand, you are producing butter and want to 

 get the largest possible yield, it is wise for ypu to keep those 

 breeds or those strains which give a large proportion of butter 

 fat in the milk, and in this respect the Jerseys and the Guernseys 

 are valuable perhaps above all other breeds. The New York 

 Agricultural Experiment Station made a comparison of four of 

 the leading breeds of dairy stock — the Jerseys, Guernseys, Hol- 

 steins and Ayrshires — and they classed the Jerseys and Guern- 

 seys as butter producing breeds from the high per cent of but- 

 ter fat contained in their milk. The average percentage of solids 

 was about 15, and in that 15 per cent of solids about 5 per cent 

 was butter fat. The Ayrshires were a medium breed. They 

 gave very much larger quantities of milk than the Jerseys or 

 Guernseys, but with not nearly so large a proportion of solids 

 and butter fat — only about 121^ to 13 per cent of total solids and 

 about 3^ per cent of fat. \Mth the Holsteins the precentage of 

 solids was even less, sometimes as low as 11^ or 12, with 3 to 

 Syi per cent butter fat, but the yields of milk were much larger 

 than for anv other breed. I do not mean to sav that there are 

 no Holsteins, or Ayrshires that give richer milk than here indi- 

 cated, or no Jerseys or Guernseys that give thinner or poorer 

 milk, because there are individual variations in every breed, and 

 sometimes those individual variations, within a breed, are very 

 great indeed. But these figures, which I have given, represent 

 the general average of the breeds indicated. So in selecting 

 stock it is wise to decide first the line of work which you will pur- 

 sue, and then to choose those breeds, or the grades of those 

 breeds that will give you the greatest amount of the products for 

 which your line of business calls. 



A word might be said in regard to grade stock. By grade 

 stock we mean stock that has a thoroughbred parent on one side 



