The Plymouth tribune. (Plymouth, Ind.) 1901-1911, 1905-03-16
TESTING COWS.

I'D lA>d W w
A correspondent of the Michigan
Farmer inquired if it was practical
to weigh and take a sample OF each
cows milk night and morning and
test same one per month in a herd
of ten cows and was replied to as fol-
lows:
1t is practical to weigh the milk at
each milking and this ought to be
done. / think mixers will take
enough more pains in milking, where
they weigh and record the weight
of milk each time, to pay well for the
time spent in the practice. If SAM
pie of milk is taken from each milk
ing and then a composite test made
each week, you certainly know just
what each COW is doing. For
breeding nerd, where one wishes to
dispose of the surplus stock at the
highest price, this is entirely practi-
cal and necessary. But for the pur-
pose of wedding out the Improbable
COWS it is not necessary to go TO
quite this trouble. If you weigh the
milk at each milking, so much the
better, but you can weigh one day
in a week and estimate the weight
for the rest of the time from this and
get a close approximation of the
yield of milk. Suppose you weigh
Thursday of each week and a COW
gives in the morning 1873 pounds and
at night 1877 pounds, or "a pounds for
the day. Now multiply this by z and
238 pounds becomes the estimated
amount of milk for the week. You
will find this accurate enough for
wedding out the "star boarders."
Look at the record from our expert
nent station where every making is
weighed and take a certain day of
the week right along for year, max
ing the estimate as described above,
and you will find that you come very
close to the actual number of pounds
of milk for the year. I figured this
out from the records of the dairy
COWS at the Worlds Fair at Chicago
and the difference was only a few
pounds.
Again, it is quite sufficient for our
purpose to weigh every 10th day if
preferred, instead of every 7th day,
and the figuring is much more easily
dJne. Take the same illustration az
before. The cows gives "a pounds
in a day and for 10 days you have
$40 pounds, or, simply move the deci-
NAL pont one place to the right. The
greatest trouble with this, however,
is that the mixers forget and do not
weight every tenth day. But bulle-
tin could be posted up in the stable
that would show just the date the
milk should be weighed and in little
while the habit would become fixed.
AS to testing the milk, it is not
necessary, for the purpose you name,
to take a sample from each milking
or for that matter every week. Cows
vary but little from day, or from week,
in their percentage of butter fat.
When a COW is fresh she does no.,
as q rule give quite as rich milk as
she does farther along in the period
of lactation, and when she is nearly
dry she gives the richest milk of any
portion of the period. Hence, if you
test for butter fat when the cow is
comparatively FRESH, again near the
middle of the period of lactation and
once more near the close of the per-
iod, and then take the average of
these tests, you will have fairly &C
curate test of the percentage of but
ter fat the COW yields. There is no
question whatever about your being
able to pick out the good COWS from
the poor by means of such a test.
But, as stated above, if you want
to make official test or private tests
that you can swear by, you must
weigh and sample each milking. The
average man will not do this, nor
is it necessary for all practical pur-
poses. He should, however, know
what each cow is doing that he may
keep his herd up to the highest de-
gree of efficiency and it can be done
with little trouble, as l have indicat-