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Selecting which heifers to keep
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<blockquote data-quote="KNERSIE" data-source="post: 600903" data-attributes="member: 4353"><p>For the sake of not being quoted out of context I'll quote myself here, note the first bolded sentence.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>The coat is the outward indication of how well adapted a cow is to her environment. Adapted cattle have a soft shiny coat, they are also the first to shed their winter coat in the spring and even in their winter coat the coat doesn't look dull and unthrifty. An adapted cow will always outproduce a not so adapted cow in the long run. As soon as a cow struggles, whether it is stress related, nutritional, environmentanl, etc it will show in the coat.</p><p></p><p>You could go further and try and determine why an animal isn't adapted to their environment, Prof JC Bonsma has done exactly that in his research and through years of scientific studies came to the conclusion that the felting quality of the hair was the best indication of how well adapted the animal is to its environment. </p><p></p><p>Depending on your climate you could probably get away with quite a variety of coat qualities to a certain degree, but if your climate is hot and subtropical with a high external parasite pressure nature will soon show you what works and what don't. (refer back to the sentence in bold)</p><p></p><p>If you can get the book "Benchmark Papers of Bonsma" there are quite a few articles on this subject explaining it much better than I do.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="KNERSIE, post: 600903, member: 4353"] For the sake of not being quoted out of context I'll quote myself here, note the first bolded sentence. The coat is the outward indication of how well adapted a cow is to her environment. Adapted cattle have a soft shiny coat, they are also the first to shed their winter coat in the spring and even in their winter coat the coat doesn't look dull and unthrifty. An adapted cow will always outproduce a not so adapted cow in the long run. As soon as a cow struggles, whether it is stress related, nutritional, environmentanl, etc it will show in the coat. You could go further and try and determine why an animal isn't adapted to their environment, Prof JC Bonsma has done exactly that in his research and through years of scientific studies came to the conclusion that the felting quality of the hair was the best indication of how well adapted the animal is to its environment. Depending on your climate you could probably get away with quite a variety of coat qualities to a certain degree, but if your climate is hot and subtropical with a high external parasite pressure nature will soon show you what works and what don't. (refer back to the sentence in bold) If you can get the book "Benchmark Papers of Bonsma" there are quite a few articles on this subject explaining it much better than I do. [/QUOTE]
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