198 Types and Market Classes of Live Stock 



or three years in small herds without mating them with their daughters, 

 but a bull association puts a stop to this practice. The cooperative 

 bull association usually has its membership divided into three or more 

 blocks, each block being supplied with one bull which is kept two years 

 and then shifted to another block. The bulls are owned by the associa- 

 tion as a whole. The purchase price and cost of maintenance are 

 distributed according to the number of cows owned by each member. 

 By combining the cow-testing association and the bull association, 

 members of the latter may not only own good bulls, but they may de- 

 termine the actual ability of these bulls and may keep a high-class sire 

 in use to his full capacity as long as he is serviceable. 



The first cooperative bull association was organized by the Michi- 

 gan Agricultural College in 1908. On July 1, 1922, there were 190 

 active associations in 36 states, with a total membership of 6,102, 

 owning 857 purebred bulls. The 6,102 members owned 40,669 cows, 

 7,123 of which were purebred. There was an average of 6.7 cows per 

 member, 7 members per bull, and 32 members per association. ^ These 

 averages show that it is the small dairyman who benefits most from 

 such an organization. As one writer states, ^ "Fifty dollars may buy 

 a scrub bull, but if five farmers will join an association and pay $50 

 each, they may own a $250 bull." 



Pennsylvania with 27 associations and 527 members had the most 

 bull associations in 1922, and South Carolina with 23 associations and 

 930 members had the largest membership. When questioned regarding 

 the value of cooperative bull associations, 150 farmers in Maryland, 

 Michigan, and Minnesota estimated that the use of the association 

 bulls increased the value of the offspring from the first cross from 30 

 to 80 per cent, with an average of 65 per cent. ^ 



Results obtained in grading. — There is great need for the improve- 

 ment of the average dairy cow of the country. The small number of 

 purebred dairy cows makes it inadvisable to recommend that this im- 

 provement shall be accomplished by replacing the average cow with a 

 purebred cow, and that all milk and butter-fat shall be produced by 

 purebred cattle. ^ However, this ideal is easily possible of close ap- 



lU. S. Dept. Agr., Bur. Anim. Indus., Dairy Div., Directory of Cooperative 

 Bull Associations in the United States, Active July 1, 1922. 



2J. C. McDowell: Butter-fat and Income, U. S. Dept. Agr. Yearbook, 1917, 

 p. 360. 



3 J. G. Winkjer: Cooperative Bull Associations, U. S. Dept. Agr. Farmers' Bui. 

 993, p. 6. 



4 About 3 per cent of the dairy cattle of the United States are purebred and 

 registered. The ten leading states in numbers of registered dairy cattle as shown 

 by the 1920 census, in order of rank, were New York, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, 

 Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Vermont, Texas, and Indiana. New York with over 

 150,000 head had one-sixth of the registered dairy cattle of the country, and Wis- 

 consin with 115,000 had one-eighth. 



