1906.] 



Butter Tests. 



199 



50 per cent, more food, and in order to arrive at a fair compari- 

 son of the return in butter for the consumption of a given 

 weight of food when given to Shorthorns and Jerseys respec- 

 tively we must reduce the }'ield of butter to some convenient 

 standard of comparison. One thousand pounds hve weight 

 suggests itself as such a standard, and the yield of butter has 

 in each case been reduced to these terms. We then find that 

 the Shorthorns yielded 176 lb. and the Jerseys 303 lb. of 

 butter per 1,000 lb. live weight, or, in other words, for equal 

 quantities of food consumed, the advantage in favour of the 

 Jerseys amounts to no less than 127 lb. ; or, putting it another 

 way, for equal consumption of food, the Jerseys produce 72 per 

 cent, more butter than do the Shorthorns. This, however, doe 

 not represent the whole of the advantages in favour of the 

 Jerseys, since the quality of the butter made^ from their milk is 

 very superior to that made from Shorthorn milk, and it would at 

 any time fetch at least id. or 2d. per lb. more. 



If this represented the whole of the question, every fair- 

 minded man would be compelled to admit that where butter- 

 making is the object in view the Jersey should be preferred to 

 the Shorthorn, and there is not the slightest doubt that while 

 she is in profit the smaller animal is immeasurably superior. 

 Other considerations have, however, to be taken into account, but 

 unfortunately it was not found possible to deal with these with- 

 out keeping the two herds entirely separate and distinct in 

 every way, and this was not practicable. The first objection to 

 the Jerseys — and this was a fatal one at Bickenhall — is their 

 delicacy of constitution. It is to be expected that a breed of 

 cattle which have been in-bred for so many generations and which 

 are constantly denuding themselves of their fat to put it in the 

 pail should not possess the robustness of constitution which less 

 closely in-bred or highly specialized cattle possess. It is a 

 matter of comm.on experience that the deepest-milking cows 

 of any breed carry least fiesh, and are most likely to go wrong. 

 It seems inevitable, therefore, that so long as the characteristics 

 of the Jersey breed remain what they are, they should, except 

 in the most favourable situations, exhibit this delicacy of con- 

 stitution. Be that as it ma\', our losses at Bickenhall were 

 serious, no fewer than two cows per annum on the average suc- 

 cumbing to tuberculosis or milk fever, to both of which diseases 



