148 Breeding Plants and Animals. 



home and abroad to get their ideas and to know their 

 stock, of studying- pedigrees and family values, of 

 learning where the horses are to be found which would 

 have greatest permanent value in the new stud, what 

 prices to pay, how to buy, transport and how to care 

 for, breed and develop the animals, once foundation 

 stock should have been secured. 



The farm work on 25,000 acres under rotation 

 growing especially bred seed corn, seed grain, grass 

 seed and clover seed -would surely need 400 mares to 

 do it one for each 40 acres of land under plow. It 

 would be neither practicable nor wise to stock up with 

 so many mares at first, but the 100 mares, more or 

 less, which might be collected at the start could be 

 chosen from among the best Percherons in America 

 and Europe, and to go with them a number of stallions, 

 we will assume twenty, should be purchased. The 

 mares could be divided into twenty groups of five or 

 more each and placed upon separate farms or merely 

 recorded separately, and one stallion could be bred to 

 each lot. The stallion is "half the herd," and stallions 

 should become foundation individuals. As a stallion's 

 blood can be multipled from fifty to 200 times as fast 

 as a mare's the females are especially useful to get 

 the centgener values of the stallions, and incidentally to 

 give their own centgener values and to serve as foun- 

 dation mothers. 



The second year the stallions could be shifted, as 

 by shifting the stallion with the first group of mares to 

 be with the second group, the one with the second to 

 the third group and so on to the tenth, if there were ten 

 stallions on ten farms which would go to the first group. 

 Each year a similar shift should' be made. In three 

 to five years, possibly sooner, the colts of certain stal- 

 lions would show their sires' superior breeding values, 

 and in other cases the progeny would warrant discard- 

 ing some of the sires used. In place of some or all of 

 these discarded stallions other purchases could be 

 introduced. As the years passed the tabulated records, 



