Friday, March 12, 2010

Inheritance Value of Breeds

 The breed is only one of many factors to be considered in carrying on profitable milk production. In some cases the value of the breed is overestimated, but more often the reverse is true. Our present dairy breeds represent the efforts toward improvement in certain definite lines made by several generations of breeders. It would be folly for a man to attempt to start at the beginning to build up for himself what has taken a century or more for others to build. By making use of animals of a highly developed breed, adapted to the purpose for which they are to be used, he is taking advantage of all the work that has been done and starting at the highest point of advancement reached by other breeders.
 Pure breeds have been bred generation after generation with certain objects in view, and in the course of time these characters I income fixed as breed characters, and are transmitted. It is easy to understand why the chances are good for getting a good dairy cow if the ancestors are the Holstein — known to have been bred about 2,000 years in one locality and noted for hundreds of years as great dairy animals — or if the parents are Jerseys, bred for 500 years, or longer, along one line.

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