No. 4.] HINTS FOR DAIRYMEN. 287 



surplus made which is utterly impossible with ordinary 

 animals. 



Knoiv what your Cows are doing. — The difficulty of 

 selecting and maintaining a herd of the best dairy cows lies 

 in the farmers' imperfect knowledge of what each cow is 

 doing. In a general way farmers think they know which is 

 their best cow or which is their poorest, and they have per- 

 haps a fairly accurate idea of the relative excellence of indi- 

 viduals in the herd. 



Very rarely, however, is a dairyman well informed on the 

 profit and loss phase of his business. I would strongly urge 

 the recording of each cow's product, by weighing daily, or 

 at regular intervals, the milk, supplementing this informa- 

 tion by occasional Babcock tests, and from this data com- 

 puting the annual product both in pounds of milk and in 

 pounds of fat. Many surprises would come to the dairyman 

 if such records were kept. The cow that started in so big 

 and then went dry four months could be justly compared 

 with the one that maintained a moderate flow throughout the 

 season. It might often be found that neither the big-gest 

 milker nor the richest cow gave the largest yield of fat in a 

 year. Some favorites might be found lacking, while some 

 plain, common, everyday cows might prove pillars of their 

 owners' credit. Accurate records of product and cost for 

 each cow are valuable and profitable in many wa^^s. 



1. They enable us to weed out the herd, selling the un- 

 profitable members, retaining those that pay dividends and 

 replacing those sold with money-makers. In the absence 

 of such records it is impossible to do this with certainty. 



2. They serve as a tab on the milkers. Where daily 

 weighings are recorded, any variation is noticed and traced 

 to its cause. If a cow is not milked clean the fact is dis- 

 covered. Poor work is in this way discouraged. A larger 

 product will be secured, and the danger of drying ofl* from 

 imperfect milking will be lessened. 



3. Disorders in cows are more quickly discovered and 

 checked. If a cow goes oft' her feed, her daily record gives 

 the first indication, and at that time serious loss can gener- 

 ally be averted ; while, if knowledge is delayed until ob- 

 tained in other ways, serious results are often experienced. 



