As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
It is a most pleasant thing to know that in hundreds of years, the Jersey cow has not changed one bit, even with the interference of breeding.
I found this explanation of them from the Channel Islands of Jersey, and wonder of them in why those islands were not England, instead of that wet foggy mass that is England.
This system of small farms has no doubt had a considerable influence on the formation of the Jersey type of cow. The land is at once so valuable and so productive that a sort of "garden" cultivation is the rule, with deep ploughing and heavy manuring. The mildness of the climate in winter is phenomenal for the latitude. Oranges and lemons ripen in the open air, and flowering shrubs may be seen in December. The pastures are green and nutritious the year around. This environment has produced the Jersey cow—an animal small in size compared with some other breeds of cattle, docile, domestic, and highly specialized for the production of rich milk. The Jersey farmer tries to have his cows calve during the first three months of the year. They are housed at night during the winter, being brought in about Tour o'clock in the afternoon, when they are milked, each receiving about three-quarters of a bushel of roots and some hay. At eight o'clock a bundle of straw is given to each. In the morning they are milked and fed about six o'clock, again receiving the same allowance of roots and hay, and at nine are turned out to pasture. Farmers endeavor to drv their cows about a month or six weeks before calving. Bran mashes are given them about the time of calving, and for a fortnight thereafter, the only time this food is used.
Gow, R. M. (Robert M.); American Jersey Cattle Club. About Jersey cattle, the butter breed (Kindle Locations 156-165). New York, American Jersey Cattle Club.
One never thinks of England or France in being citrus orchards, and yet Jersey is. Such a disappointment the New Jersey of America falling short in being more like England than paradise.
What a climate to produce this special bovine that only God knows where it arose from, although they do appear close to the Roman Park cattle.
I think of the miniature Baby Belle goring me with her little horns and me kicking her in the shoulder in cow talk to tell her that is not going to be tolerated as she was upset about being led........and then Daisy who is forever running for joy. She really is doglike in character. I will forever see her eating grain or grazing and me coming up to her side and putting my arm over her back and rubbing her stomach.
It is the oddest of thing to have a creature this large and yet so intimate. Somehow I noticed my rib hurt and a black spot........perhaps was Daisy or not, but it does happen never from malice, but from what came out of that Garden Isle, where the people were gardeners and not farmers. It was a manicured kingdom of the clouds with it's own fortress looking fast upon France.
It honestly with Viking, French, Spanish, Danes, Germans a complete mystery how the population or the animals survived, and yet they did. Perhaps looking at Daisy and Belle, they were just too endearing of animals which tamed the savage breast as no one could harm a Jersey.
I think that when God wiped out Eden, that he must have made Jersey and those cattle as his own orange blossom isle to walk in the gardens of, to enjoy his creatures two leg and four, and make things what are, like they were, and know they will be again.
agtG
