This past Tuesday was classification day! Every 7-9 months, a representative from the Holstein Association comes out to judge and score our cows based on their body traits. It's basically like a big Miss America pageant for our lovely bovines! There are two major reasons that farms go through the classification process. The first reason is that every cow's scores and her faults and weaknesses are recorded and linked back to her sire (father). Once the data from a bunch of the sire's babies is combined, this can tell you something about the sire himself! For example, if a bull sires 100 female calves over his lifespan and 85 of them end up having low scores on the shape of their udder, this means that he probably doesn't pass on good udder genetics to his babies. If he has 90 female calves with good feet and legs, then WINNER! He is a great bull for this trait.
This leads into the second reason for classification: helping to match sires and cows for breeding. Let's say that Lizz has a lovely young cow that she wants to breed. This gal has a great udder, awesome front end, and a good rump, but terrible feet and legs! Obviously, Lizz is going to want to breed her to a sire that has much better genetics for feet and legs to give the baby a good chance of being healthy and strong. She can look at the classification data for all of the sires and pick out one that tends to have babies with this trait. However, it gets complicated because what if the sire with awesome feet genetics tends to have calves with bad udder placement? She has to weigh the pros and cons of each sire and then make an educated decision. Ideally, every cow would be bred to a perfect sire and have wonderful babies, but the best sires are (of course) the most expensive!
Okay, now it's time to get back to the classification at Witter on Tuesday. We spent about a week preparing for the classification by cleaning the barn from top to bottom - including the cows! Lizz organized all of her workers and the UMADCOWS class and we each did some little cleaning projects to get the job done. On the day of the classification, we got up before dawn and woke the cows up to milk them and give them baths. Some of them seemed to enjoy it, but the others obviously resented both the early morning and the hose! In the end, they all ended up looking sparking clean and we were very proud of our herd.
Here is the breakdown for the overall scores:
Excellent: 90-97 points
Very Good: 85-89 points
Good Plus: 80-84 points
Good: 75-79 points
Fair: 65-74 points
Poor: 50-64 points
The average score for a cow is an 80. Most of our cows at Witter are usually in the Good Plus category which means that we have a very nice little herd! There are always some outliers, but most of our ladies are quite well bred. The classifier said that our cows in particular have great looking feet and legs, which is great because this means that they will probably live a long time.
One last note - we had the first calf born this fall for our UMADCOWS class - meet Jasper! His cow mom is Polkadot, and his human moms are Anne and Shannon. Congratulations to all three of them!