€2i ANNUAL. REPORT OP THE Cff. Doc. 



The modern dairy cow is not a rustler. She must be given care, 

 surroundings or environment, and feed suitable to her artificial 

 nature, if you expect the results she is capable of giving. 



Then comes the everlassting proposition of fann economics^ 

 reducing the cost of production. When I turned to these two cows, 

 •one giving me twice the product for the same cost of food that 

 the other does, I naturally enquire how this conn^s. 2sow when I 

 find that the first cow comes down from a better line of producing 

 ancestors than the other, it is apt to impress me with the idea 

 that there is something in breeding, not everything, but something. 



NoAV, all there is to the question of breeding for specific qualities 

 or traits, is the attempt to establish as a breed characteristic, that 

 which originally existed as an individual characteristic. So after 

 a long time, we have the Holstein cow with her peculiar traits, 

 bred into her for a thousand years; the Ayrshire with hers, the 

 Jersey and the Guernsey with theirs. If you study her you will 

 find that nature does her best work in straight lines, and in obed- 

 ience to single purposes. If you attempt to make her construct a 

 combined speed and draft horse, or a combined milk and beef cow, 

 she tells you at once that the structural type or form of each is 

 different, owing to the demand of differing functions, the same 

 as the difference in form of the sewing machine and the mowing 

 machine. 



She tells you also that established i3repotencies of heredity, one 

 ox>posing the other, cannot be mated and combined to the estab- 

 lishment of a third prepotency partaking of the nature of both. 



She tells you further, that such a forced combination results 

 in a conflict of prepotencies and no wise breeder will set Nature 

 to fighting herself. Our "dual purpose" friends have made one 

 serious mistake. They have based their theory too much on the 

 sporadic or occasional appearance of some mose excellent cow 

 here and there in their ranks. They have gone on building the 

 beefiest bulls they could produce, paying no attention to the laws 

 of dairy form and function, and expecting profitable milk results 

 from such a contradictory combination. 



I have asked for two years the question: Where are the Short- 

 horn bulls, for instance, that show in th«ir form and outline, a milk 

 heredity, or than can be depended on to breed with any profitable 

 certainty for milk production? This ignoring almost together the 

 male line of decent, all the time breeding from the beefiest of beef 

 heredity, and then talking about "a milking strain" is unscientific, 

 impracticable, and as the old Yankee said "insensible." 



