Get the latest tech news
How big data created the modern dairy cow
What do cryogenics, butterfat tests, and genetic data have in common? They’re some of the reasons behind the world’s most productive dairy cows. Here's how it all started.
Holstein breeders would learn this lesson in the 1990s when a prolific bull named Star, born in the 1960s, spread two diseases, complex vertebral malformation and bovine leukocyte adhesion deficiency, through recessive traits, leading to calf deaths as far as three generations later. In 1890, American agricultural chemist Stephen M. Babcock developed a new method to determine how much of a milk sample was butterfat versus water that was lower cost, more accurate, and could be done easily on the farm. The revolution in cattle genetics that began with the cow-testing associations of the early 1900s and grew more sophisticated with the formation of the NCDHIP in the 1930s and the advent of artificial insemination and cryogenics in the 1950s continued in the intervening decades.
Or read this on Hacker News
