CHAPTER III
THE PURE BRED SIRE
There is one law of breeding that does not seem to be recognized by people generally and in our judgment it is of greatest importance. This law is that the influence of the parent animals are not equal upon the offspring. This has been noticed in human experiences. No child is exactly one-half like his father and one-half like his mother, but is likely to be much like either one or the other. He is likely to be nine-tenths like one parent and one-tenth like the other. It is the same in grading live stock and this trait in breeding is of the greatest advantage to the breeder of grade stock. If the calf takes after the sire and the sire is a pure bred of strong type, the calf may be nearly as strong in producing ability as the pure bred ancestors. On the other hand, even pure bred cattle may breed back at times, and their offspring resemble some distant scrub member in the ancestry. Breeders are well aware of this fact and try very hard to keep all inferior cattle entirely eliminated from their line of breeding. It is important that they should for their line should breed as true as possible, and really poor calves with them are rare.
The pure bred bull of a long established type is more likely to mark his offspring than is the scrub cow. A fairly large per cent, considerably more than half, of the heifers will be good and some of them nearly as good in milk production as the pure breds themselves. Grade cows are very valuable as milk producers, but grade bulls should not be used as sires because they do not have the ability to breed true like the pure bred.
Most farmers have been in the habit of using a bull a couple of years and then selling him to the butcher before his real worth was discovered. A bull’s ability to produce heifers that make good cows can only be definitely told after his heifers have freshened and made records. Some of the best pure bred breeders in the United States will not use a bull on their best cows until one hundred of his daughters are in the Advanced Registry which means that beginning at the age of two years they must produce 250.5 pounds of butter fat annually and must increase the production to 360 pounds of butter fat at the age of five years. In this way the best bulls are ascertained and are used to the best advantage. But there is also a way for the average farmer to receive the benefits of a good tested-out breeding stock at low cost. I refer to the co-operative bull associations and quote from Kimball’s Dairy Farmer concerning them:
“A co-operative bull association is a farmer’s organization whose purpose is the joint ownership, use, and exchange of three or more high-class pure bred bulls. The territory covered by the association is divided into three or more breeding blocks and a bull is stationed in each block for the service of the fifty or sixty cows in the block. Every two years the bulls are interchanged. Thus, at a small cost, a bull for every sixty cows is provided for six or more years. The cost of bull service is greatly reduced, the best bulls obtained, and the bulls of outstanding merit are preserved for their entire period of usefulness.”