This printing plate dates to 1957 and it concerns the British dairy industry, particularly the breeding of cattle, artificial insemination, the selection of bulls and the attempt to increase milk production.

The ‘Bull Nursery’ section talks about young bulls being selected for artificial-insemination work, the qualities breeders were looking for and the importance of choosing bulls that could improve the next generation of dairy cattle.

It also talks about progeny testing. In simple terms, that's the process of judging a bull by looking at how his daughters perform. If a bull's daughters went on to produce more milk, or otherwise proved to have desirable characteristics, that gave breeders evidence that the bull was carrying valuable genetics.

And that's really what this whole piece is about, better bulls producing better herds.

The other major article is headed ‘Milk Yields Rise Again’, and it contains statistics and a graph comparing milk production.

The page is full of the kind of information you'd expect from a 1950s agricultural publication, figures for milk production, numbers of cattle being inseminated, breeding results and information intended for dairy farmers.

It even includes a reminder to pass the publication on so that the herdsman could see it.

And there's another important piece of history behind all of this. Artificial insemination was becoming increasingly important in British dairy farming at this time. The Milk Marketing Board was involved in establishing and operating artificial-insemination centres and Parliament was already discussing the importance of carefully selecting the bulls used by those centres as far back as the 1940s.

By the 1950s, this was becoming a major part of the effort to improve Britain's dairy herds. Instead of every farmer simply having to keep and breed from his own bull, artificial insemination meant that the genetics of carefully selected bulls could be used across a huge number of farms. That meant one particularly good bull could potentially influence thousands of cattle.

And that's why the information on this plate mattered. It wasn't simply telling farmers how much milk their cows were producing. It was part of a much bigger change in agriculture, using breeding records, statistics and artificial insemination to deliberately improve the national dairy herd.

There are also some fascinating figures on the plate. It refers to more than 1.3 million cows being inseminated through Board centres during the preceding period, and discusses the enormous scale that artificial insemination had reached by 1957. There are references to progeny-tested bulls, inspections of daughters, breeding programmes and the selection of cattle based on their performance. There is even a graph showing milk yields and how they were changing.

So when you look at this today, you're actually looking at a snapshot of how people in the 1950s thought about the future of farming.

They were trying to produce more milk, better cattle and more efficient herds and they were doing it using some of the most advanced breeding techniques available at the time.

This unique piece connects several parts of British history, the history of printing, the history of British farming, the development of artificial insemination and The science of selective breeding.