Milk v. Magnificence

The 600,000 U. S. dairy farms carry on an industry whose annual output is almost equal in value to that of petroleum and runs automobiles a close race. Its gross revenue of a billion and a half dollars exceeds that for all grains and vegetables combined, accounts for more than a quarter of total U. S. farm income. Its $7,000,000,000 worth of land, buildings and herds make it the No. 1 cash venture in agriculture. For cooking, drinking, canning, butter, cheese its 26,000,000 cows yield a hundred billion pounds of milk every year. Into the midst of this great industry last week was tossed a book called Breeding Profitable Dairy Cattle* which contained the astounding charge that most U. S. milk is eked from almost medieval cattle bred by almost medieval methods, despite the fact that a much better method is available and much better grades of cattle in sight.

Breeding Profitable Dairy Cattle is not a modest book; it was not written by a modest man. Backed by an imposing array of hard fact, cold logic and concrete results, it is intended to give conquering impetus to a great campaign. Its avowed purpose is nothing less than "to do for animal husbandry in the 20th Century as much as was done for crop farming in the 19th Century by the invention of agricultural machinery." It was written by a rich, disputatious, immensely learned old gentleman named E. (for Ezra) Parmelee Prentice, who is a son-in-law of John Davison Rockefeller.

Breeder Prentice bought his first bull two decades ago. A handsome, impeccably pedigreed creature, it cost Breeder Prentice $10,000 and turned out to be sterile. That was probably the first come-uppance smart Mr. Prentice ever had. He was born 71 years ago, scion of an old Albany family in which pedigreed cattle had long been a hobby. He sped through Amherst and Harvard Law School, went to Chicago, got a reputation as one of the city's ablest and coldest young men, made friends with Cyrus McCormick, became general counsel for Illinois Steel. At the turn of the Century, he moved to Manhattan and married Alta Rockefeller whose fortune was estimated at $50,000,000. Active law practice held him not many years after that. In 1911 he bought 1,000 acres in the Berkshires near Williamstown, Mass., called the place Mount Hope, has spent much of his time there ever since. He became a world authority on potato growing, experimented with corn from South America, bees, poultry, finally and most importantly with cattle. Able to converse fluently in Latin, he made his three children learn to speak it, and visitors occasionally heard the tots deliver bulletins on the day's egg output in the sonorous language of Cicero. Today there are 1,500 acres around the 220-ft.-long house at Mount Hope and the tax assessment is one of the two highest in Massachusetts. Placid, meticulous Mrs. Prentice has a great pipe organ, gives elaborate musicales. A corps of geneticists and laboratory workers is constantly in residence, juggling the genes and chromosomes of 10,000 mice. Friends and admirers say that Mr. Prentice's unique achievement could never have come about had he not been rich enough to finance it, inquisitive and learned enough to direct it himself.

Critic. What U. S. dairymen need are not fancy animals but any sort of cow that gives high quantities of good milk. The two, says Critic Prentice, are not necessarily, or even often, the same. There is a false emphasis on '"type" (show-ring points) and pedigree. High milk production is an inherited capacity which cannot be told by looking at the creature. Nevertheless breeders buy cows which have "long thin tails with a good switch," buff noses, incurving horns, in the belief that such dams will infallibly transmit their milk-producing ability to their calves. To sire their herds they buy champion bulls which have convinced judges on some 25 show-ring points. The result is that unbiased experts no longer claim that cows registered, in herd books produce more milk than unregistered animals, that wise breeders sometimes pay more for unregistered cows than for their elite sisters. A survey in South Africa showed that when a dozen champion bulls were used for sires, they had daughters whose milk capacity averaged 1,000 lb. lower than the dams. Thus Mr. Prentice brings his argument down to a clear-cut issue: high milk production and butterfat percentage v. show-ring magnificence.

Scientist. Not entirely to nearsightedness and fatuity does Mr. Prentice lay the blame for confusion and low milk output. The science of genetics is no older than the 20th Century, and it has been pursued mainly with laboratory animals--fruit flies, guinea pigs, mice, paramecia. It is not surprising that the average cattleman should never have heard of sex-linkage, crossing over, multiple allelomorphism, or know that inheritance is a complex mechanism controlled by genes, invisible unit carriers of hereditary characters.

So many genes are involved in transmitting milk ability that it is far beyond mathematical analysis. But Mr. Prentice and his staff were convinced that by assiduous testing under the general laws of genetics they could find what they wanted. They found first, as others had found, that a cow inherits productive capacity from both dam and sire. They found further that, as regards quantity of milk, a cow gets seven-tenths of her inheritance from whichever parent has the higher inheritance; as regards butterfat percentage, four-tenths of her inheritance from whichever parent is higher. The dam's inheritance was obvious from her output. The problem remained how to evaluate the bull's transmitting capacity. The Prentice group chose the method of systematically comparing the yield of bulls' daughters with the yield of their dams. In such wise Mr. Prentice's geneticist-in-chief arrived at Mount Hope's crowning achievement--the Mount Hope Bull Index.

First bull index published in any trade paper, the Mount Hope formula appeared in 1928. It was in two forms. The Commercial Form, for dairymen unwilling or unable to deal with fractions, simply placed the milk ability of the progeny halfway between the inheritances of the parents. Thus if the dam's production was 8,000 lb. and the daughter's 10,000, the bull's index was 12,000. The index was of course computed on the basis of as many dam-daughter comparisons as possible.

The Precise Form, which took into account the seven-tenths (milk) and four-tenths (butterfat) inheritance leanings toward the higher parent, was as follows: If the daughter's average exceeds the dam's average, add three-sevenths of the difference to the daughter's average to get the bull's index; if the daughter's average be less than the dam's, subtract seven-thirds of the difference from the daughter's average to get the bull's index.

On the basis of his own results Mr. Prentice feels that the Commercial Index is good enough, if generally used, to double, triple, or quadruple the production of U.S. herds at no increase in cost.

Results. Mr. Prentice made his start with low-producing cows selected only for reasons of health. By using only tested bulls of high index, he has bred a new strain which he calls American Dairy Cattle and which average about 21,000 lb. of milk per year as against the New England average of 4,500 Ib. The Mount Hope Index has been adopted by the Royal Guernsey Society, the Suffolk Milk Recording Society, the Holstein-Friesian Association of America, the Connecticut Proved Sire Program, the Wisconsin Dairymen's Association. It is advocated by Massachusetts State College, and by the Massachusetts State Department of Agriculture which awarded Mr. Prentice a gold medal. He has been decorated by the Italian Government. A German observer sent back a report to his Government that sounded like an advertisement for Mount Hope, described it as the only private research institution of its kind in the world. Mount Hope has been visited by commissions from Poland. Turkey, Greece, South Africa, Bulgaria and elsewhere. Some of their learned members, Mr. Prentice was delighted to find, could converse with him in Latin.

* Houghton Mifflin, $2.5.0.

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