Annual Report of the Michigan Dairymen's Association Volume 14 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1898 edition. Excerpt: ...of 5 on my card; the very next Monday I will have a test of 4.8, 4.6, or 4.7. Now is the trouble in the bottles or in the cow? Prof. Smith: Oh, it is the pesky cow. I never feel like criticising the Almighty, but I do believe if I had been present on the morning when the stars sang together, I could have made some suggestions that would have been helpful to him. In the first place, for your sakes and mine, I would have erected in the cow some sort of machinery that I could have fixed up on Saturday that would let me go to meeting on Sunday. The next thing I would arrange that she should give milk regularly as to quantity and regularly as to quality. I have in mind a Holstein cow who gave us milk one morning at 4.2 and she gave us milk that very night 3.2 fat, and we don't know what the trouble was. We know about the cow just what is outside of her skin. In the mysterious laboratory of her body what takes place we know nothing about, causes are at work and results are obtained in the digestive and secretive organs of a cow that we don't know anything about. At the time we had that experience with the Holstein cow, 1 said to my assistants, "How is it about the herd?" So we went to work to find out and I wish I had my figures here. We took twenty-nine cows for a certain week and they gave 13.3 pounds of fat. The next week they gave 127, the next 140, the next 145, the next 123, and we hadn't changed the feed nor the handling at all. The quantity of milk dropped a little at the 123 pounds period, quite considerably but not in the same proportion that the butter fat did. Mr. True and I at once instituted an investigation to find out how that herd dropped from 145 to 123 pounds. If we had been sending our milk to a creamery, we would have...