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A Weight-Height-Age Curve as a Measure of the State of Nutrition and of Growth of the Dairy Cow

Department of Dairy Husbandry, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri

ABSTRACT

The weight of an individual cow at a given age is, by itself, not an index of her condition or state of nutrition. The cow may naturally, by heredity, have a skeleton somewhat below or above the average in size and, therefore, because of the tendency to keep the symmetry between weight and height constant, also weigh less than the average. It is in fact very rare that an individual cow, selected at random, has the weight of an average cow. A ten-month-old Holstein heifer selected at random from our herd was found to differ by 50 pounds from the average weight of our ten-month-old Holstein heifers; and the difference in weight between the heaviest and lightest heifers of this breed and age in our herd was found to be 270 pounds. In other words comparing an average individual heifer under experimental conditions to the average weight of a heifer of the same age as a standard may introduce an average experimental error of 50 pounds due to the individuality of the animal and this may be as high as
or 135 pounds, or even higher.