There are cows and cows, and the animals with which I started my lessons in herdsmanship on my father's farm in Yorkshire were just cows. Any question of a breed never occurred to us. But we valued our animals and studied their needs even more than the few hobby farmers who at that time owned pedigree herds. Even as recently as that time, thirty-odd years ago, we were completely oblivious of the many diseases which beset the animal breeder of today ; veterinary surgeons devoted most of their time to horses; the maintenance of health in the herd was mainly a matter of growing good food and feeding it to the cows in adequate quantity. The successful farmer was the man with an instinct about animals; a knowledge of viruses and bacteria was not necessary. Farming was an art and not an industry beggared with 'scientists' and petty officials. Farming could only properly be performed by men who had it in their bones; there was little hope for the man who had put it all in his head. There was no ready-made answer available in a book, and very few ready-made remedies served up by the manufacturing chemists, though even then they were already founding their fortunes on the farmer's misfortunes.

   Though our cows were no particular breed at all, for want of a name they were generally considered to be Shorthorns. That must be no reflection on the Shorthorn breed of to-day. It is merely the fact that the Shorthorn breed embraces such a wide variety of colours that for general purposes an unidentifiable cow was called a Shorthorn, just as to-day a black-and-white cow, whatever its origin, is considered by the commercial farmer to be a Friesian, though pedigree breeders deplore this loose use of breed description. Strictly speaking, I suppose the words cross-bred should precede the use of a breed name where a pedigree is not available, or even when the animal is not registered in the official herd book. But the difference between a registered and an unregistered animal meant little to us. Breeds for us were distinguishable by colour rather than names in a book in London.

   What characterized our cows was the uncertainty with which they transmitted their propensities to their offspring, if at all. This provided us with a certain thrill of anticipation each time a cow was to give birth. But the bank manager rarely found that thrill a satisfactory substitute for the economical yields which planned breeding would have produced. Consequently as often as a good cow gave us a heifer as good as herself or better, she gave us a dud which was quite incapable of a profitable life in the herd. This complicated our farming by making it necessary for us to dabble in beef production, mixing it as need arose with milk production, and because of the difficulty of properly assessing the potentialities of each heifer until she had done a lactation, it meant we were engaged in the least profitable kind of beef production, that is cow beef or at best, heifer beef, whenever our guesses about the milk production capability of the animals we bred failed to come off.

   Similarly when I started farming on my own account at Goose-green, I took on a good commercial herd of Shorthorns which had a slight sprinkling of Friesians and their crosses. Though in our first year or two we were able, by heavy feeding, to get the herd average up to about 700 gallons, which was extremely good as a start with non-pedigree cattle, their daughters didn't even approach that yield, excepting the occasional fluke, though we used three different pedigree Shorthorn bulls. Yet the daughters of the only pedigree cow we had, a Friesian, by different Shorthorn bulls, all did slightly better than she (though she herself was a 1,200-gallon cow). It became clear to me then that I must have cattle which, like my Friesian, had behind them some ancestry of transmission certainty. And this could only be got by pedigree breeding. Pedigree breeding has often been called a rich man's hobby, but this experience demonstrated that in my case at any rate it was likely to be a poor man's passport to profits. And indeed it proved to be. I decided to change over to exclusively pedigree cattle, and it was as though I had been blindfold until that time, for breeding for milk production became a simple process of planning, whereas before it had been impossible guesswork.

   There were other factors which helped my decision to change over to pedigree cattle, the chief of which was disease in the herd which made some drastic changes necessary and provided an opportunity to bring in a pedigree nucleus. But I will say more about that in a later chapter, as in another chapter, too, I will explain my choice of breed. But the fact of disease, especially abortion and tuberculosis, decided me to change over gradually, replacing the Shorthorns as they calved down, with pedigree Jerseys.

   There are two systems of founding a dairy herd, both of which are reasonably safe for the inexperienced buyer. One is to go to an established herd, which has shown consistent breeding over a number of years and buy a nucleus of heifers with good production figures immediately behind them, and a bull of the same family. The other is to buy old cows that have done good records, in-calf if possible so that you have at least a calf to come if the cow herself is at the end of her career. The old cows should, if possible, be of the same strain so that you start one step along the path of your breeding policy, but don't be too rigid about the strain if the cow you want is good. It is useless to buy a cow because she is of the strain you want if she happens to be a particularly poor specimen of that strain, though it is not impossible to buy a good fluke in that way. I once did. But once in a lifetime is as much as you can expect.

   My 'fluke' was bought at a Jersey Show and Sale at Reading. She had won nothing in the ring, her highest lactation yield had been 400 gallons, she had a badly shaped udder, but she was a pleasant-looking animal and of extremely good breeding. She first came into the sale ring and was bought for 100 guineas by a very famous breeder. Why, it is difficult to imagine, for she would not have made any contribution to his already fabulous herd. Perhaps he was buying for a beginner, friend, or neighbour. But he changed his mind and the cow came back into the ring at the end of the sale with the explanation that she had been bought by mistake and was being offered again by her purchaser. This, of course, aroused suspicion. But being compelled by some inner impulse, a hunch, if you like, though I think hunches generally have a little evidence to support them, when the bids got to 40 guineas and stuck, I decided that at such a price she was worth buying as a foster mother for some calves I had. I got her for 60 guineas. She never did anything more than 400 gallons—her udder just wasn't made for more—but she bred me three good daughters, one of which gave 1,000 gallons with her first calf, and 1,500 with her second at 5-6 per cent butterfat, the second I sold before I knew the capabilities of her sister, and the third looks like doing as well as the first.

   But that is just one of those things that never happens again. It is as well in laying the foundations of a herd to forget that such possibilities exist, and don't be tempted by what appears to be cheap unless there are factors affecting the price which you know about and can remedy, but about which competing buyers are ignorant. 

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