Northern Farmer

While at the Acres USA conference a couple of weeks ago, I was able to talk with Gearld Fry, who with Charles Walters wrote the book “Reproduction and Animal Health”. When I sat down to talk with him, he was showing a couple of other farmers how to select dairy cows. He had a laptop computer with pictures. A couple of the pictures were of the hide on the end of the tail, with the hair pulled back so you could see the hide. The hide had a yellow color. He said the yellow color on the end of the tail is a sign of high butterfat. He said that this yellow color will show up on cows, calves and on bulls. So I have spent some time since pulling back the hair on the end of my cow’s tails. Of course I can’t see up close like I used to, so I have to use reading glasses or have my children tell me what they see. On all of my Jersey cows there seems to be some yellowish specks of stuff on the end of their tails, while another cow that is some mixed breed, probably red Holstein and maybe shorthorn, seems to have very little yellow color on its tail. I guess I will try to observe a number of cows over time and see if this rule holds true.

While we were talking Gearld pulled out a thin book that looked to be fairly old. He showed us a drawing of a cow’s escutcheon that was in this book. He described the characteristics of the escutcheon on a cow that would maintain production of milk over an extended period of time. I am not sure that I can give a good description of this “ideal escutcheon”, but basically the area associated with the udder should be broad and the hair (if I remember correctly) on the escutcheon should have an upward direction. The book that he showed us was the book “Milch Cows” by Guenon that he said was written in the 1700s. Gearld made a comment something to the effect that the Celtic peoples had determined how to pick optimal dairy cows hundreds of years ago. Since Gearld selects cattle that will do well on grass only, he probably meant that hundreds of years ago they knew how to pick animals that would do well on forage only.

We briefly talked about the fact that the heart girth of a beeve should be the same as the length from the poll to the tail head. He said that if the heart girth is smaller than the length, the animal will be a high maintenance animal. I have measured all of my cows and they are all about 4 inches short in heart girth. Next time I have a cow bred, I am going to try to get semen from a bull that will have a proper heart girth.

In Gearld’s book, he says that you can pregnancy check by looking at the hair whorl on a cow’s side. I asked him about this. He replied that the hair in the hair whorl on top of the spine of a cow will stand up when a cow is cycling, but that after being bred about three or four months, this hair will lay down. In addition, after being bred about three or four months the hair whorl on the side of the cow will stand out more and start taking over the whole side of the cow. I have a couple of cows that should be bred and the signs that Gearld said to look for appear to be there, but I have not had anyone pregnancy check them. So I am going to try to increase my observation skills and see if these signs actually work.

Jim V

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 11:34 pm and is filed under Jim V. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.