The golden cow is very rare now. I had some when my father and I milked years ago. He was a holstein man to the core but somehow all guernseys got stabled on the side of the barn he milked. He loved working with them. I used to have a photo of my youngest about 3 years old sitting on an upturned bucket getting the house milk. Old Maye never so much as flicked her tail at a fly when he there summer or winter. Her stallmate Roxie was younger but almost as gentle with him. We used to halter holstein first calvers and tie the rope across the stable but with guernseys I only had to stand beside them their first few milkings. The downside to guernsey cows as I see it is that they suffer from too small a gene pool. We had swinging stanchions in the barn and some cattle couldn't get up in them.I had to take out the stanchions and put a pipe across the opening with a chain and collar.The calves were sometimes 2 days old before they could stand. Mostly the big turnoff was that they were very slow to conceive. A check of the DHIA summaries of the top herds in the county revealed that a pair of master breeder guernsey herds near me were running 18 and 19 month average calving interval for their whole herd.
A couple of years before the milk cows went I crossed my best guernseys with a leading holstein bull known for easy calving.The guernseys caught on the second breeding and I got a pair of exceptional looking heifers. They looked like high quality black and whites but lighter boned. If you went into the pasture you could walk right up to them like guernseys.
Back in the day I milked for dairymen that had gone on holiday or got sick or hurt. I saw a lot of fancy cows that didn't milk and ugly grade cows that earned their keep. I even met a few crossbred cows on farms that bred everything beef and bought their replacements. Ussually what a dealer could get them cheap.If I had been able to keep milking my plan was to rotate holstein guernsey and ayrshire bulls every generation. The guernsey association used to run an ad in Hoards Dairyman extolling the virtues of using guernsey bulls on heifers. Just a thought....
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Today's Featured Article - Harvestin Hay: The Early Years (Part 2) - by Pat Browning. The summer of 1950 was the start of a new era in farming for our family. I was thirteen, and Kathy (my oldest sister) was seven. At this age, I believed tractor farming was the only way, hot stuff -- and given a chance I probably would have used the tractor, Dad's first, a 1936 Model "A" John Deere, to go bring in the cows! And I think Dad was ready for some automation too. And so it was that we acquired a good, used J. I. Case, wire tie hay baler. In addition to a person to drive th
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