State Dairy Association. 419 



BREEDING PURE STOCK AND HOW TO MAKE IT PAY. 



(By B. L. Bean, Cameron, Mo.) 



When the Secretary wrote me requesting me to write on this 

 subject I told him I could not do justice to it. He answered by 

 telling me to tell how I had gotten along in just plain English. Now, 

 all I have done in this line any "dairy farmer" can do. 



A few years ago I was raising beef cattle from common cows. 

 We made what butter we could besides raising the calves. This 

 made plenty of work and gave only small return for it. An op- 

 portunity came to sell whole milk on the butter fat basis and we 

 started at it. This paid better and was less work. 



I bought a number of good red cows, also subscribed for a 

 good dairy paper and tried to learn as much about type and the 

 relative value of all different feeds for cows as possible. I experi- 

 mented on these cows but found they were not what I wanted. I 

 found some men that had high grade Holstein cows to sell. They 

 had started in 20 years before with a good type of short horn milk 

 cows and crossed them with pure bred Holstein bulls so that their 

 youngest cows and heifers were nearly full bloods, and as good as 

 to type and markings as pure breds. This herd is a good example 

 to show what a man can do by following a straight line in breed- 

 ing. I bought seven of those cows and as they freshened, weighed 

 their milk and compared it with the other cows. The poorest one 

 of the Holstein cows gave 40 pounds of milk per day at her best, 

 and the test of the butter fat of the whole herd didn't decrease. 



I then purchased as good a registered sire as I could get and 

 sold the red cows to a feeder. After I had milked the grade cows a 

 year I was satisfied with them and I added two pure bred cows to 

 the herd. I thought that I might just as well raise a few that would 

 sell for from $50 to a $100 at a year old as to raise grades that 

 would bring only one-fourth that amount. 



I bought a cream separator and fed the skim milk to the calves 

 and pigs ; finding that I had more milk than I could feed I bought 

 eight red steer calves and raised them with the two calves from 

 the registered cows. They did well, weighing about 600 pounds 

 at a year old. But when the calves were sold the two pure breds 

 brought as much as the eight beef calves. As they had been fed 

 just the same this gave me something to figure on, and as a result 

 I replaced the grades as fast as I could with pure bred cows and 



