Perhaps the most important essential for this system is the right cow for the job. Obviously cows which may have been bred in test tubes, reared on calf gruel, milked on high protein concentrates, kept alive on synthetic minerals and trace elements, and frequently subjected to sulphonamides and penicillin and the germ-free D.D.T.-laden air of the modern milking parlour, will not take readily to a diet of roughage and fresh air.
Similarly the flat-sided, short-legged show-ring specimen with all bag and no body, will not wear well through a winter of walking to the silage heap, ripping out her own rations and spreading her own dung. What is more, on the heavy land, with her feet and udder daily dragging through mud, she is constantly liable to succumb to foot and udder troubles. Then there is the terrifying task of keeping the udders clean enough to maintain TT standards of milk production.
When we first started our self-service system and wintering our cattle out, my herdsman and I both had many a nightmare dreaming of the mud-covered udders of our best type low-chassised show cows, which took us longer to clean than to milk each morning. We are now experimenting with washable plastic brassieres for the cows which can be washed down with a hose when the cows come in to be milked, then slipped off for milking and replaced when the cows go out to the silage clamp again.
But it also became evident to us that we must breed a different type of cow. Two inches extra length in the leg made all the difference between clean teats and teats from which it was impossible to remove all the caked mud, to say nothing of the bruised and cracked skin which resulted from over-much scrubbing and scraping. Similarly an extra inch or two of width between the hind legs gave the necessary clearance between lifted feet (as the cow walked) and the sides of the udder. Cow or sickle hocks are of course impossible for this system, for they have the inevitable effect of levering the feet up to the udder and stomach at every step, plastering both with mud.
We had already bred the big-bellied cow by years of selection and natural feeding; but apart from the important essential of strong, straight legs, which served us well in this system, we had made the orthodox error of believing there was some virtue in short legs. This is really an attribute of good beef-cattle and how it came to be accepted by dairy-cattle breeders I really cannot imagine. Short legs would be all right on shallow bodies, and I am certainly aware that many high concentrate feeders have bred shallow bodies. But we don't want either shallow bodies or flat sides. Deep and wide barrels are absolutely essential to enable the cow to consume and digest large quantities of bulky food. Fortunately, in my herd we have got the barrels to deal with this bulk feeding. Now we must fit these bulk-food barrels with longer legs and broader backsides and we shall have the perfect cow for the job.
Whether such cows will ever satisfy the show judges is another matter. But they will certainly satisfy the inevitable trend of modern farming practice towards low-cost livestock husbandry with a high output per man employed.
A longer-legged cow may not be so pleasing to the eye, but there is no real indication that the length of leg has any bearing on milk output. My herd has shown that, provided body and bag are in robust conformity to the needs of heavy bulk feeding and heavy milk production, the only essential requirements for the legs are straightness and strength. The indications are that the longer-legged cows are, if anything, the more efficient converters of food into milk. But whether length of leg has the remotest influence on the animals' efficiency in converting food into milk I would not argue at this stage in my observations, for I would hesitate to be dogmatic on such inconclusive evidence. The relationship of longer leg to food-conversion efficiency is probably due to the longer-legged cow being a rather slimmer type, generally carrying less flesh, with less inclination to convert food to body fat than the shorter-legged cow, which is traditionally a beefier type, more inclined to convert its food into body fat than into milk.
What is important in this consideration of the changes in cow types that are necessary for the efficient operation of my natural-feeding system, is that we need not fear that longer legs are so undesirable as the show judge has persuaded us in the past. And the inevitable acceptance of this winter-milk-at-summer-cost-system, will make the leggier cow more popular, at least among men who have to wash the udders!
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