DAIRY MEETING. 1 37 



mum yield of other seasons. But diminished milk yield and an 

 enfeebled offspring are not the only bad results of protracted 

 milking. 



As the season of gestation advances, the composition and char- 

 acter of the milk changes. It becomes poorer in fat and richer 

 in albumen. It becomes sticky and viscous, and its flavors and 

 odors are usually depressed, sometimes to an alarming degree. 

 Indeed there are very few cows whose stripper milk is not of 

 low quality. 



As at such times the fatty globules are diminished in size and 

 the milk serum thickened and viscous, it is well known that the 

 fat is not secured by gravity separation. The greater force 

 exerted by the centrifugal separators recovers practically all of it, 

 but the wisdom of saving the stripper cream is a matter of much 

 doubt. Its quality is poor; its flavor and odor are obnoxious and 

 demoralizing to the bulk of the stock with which it is mixed, 

 and it is not infrequently the cause of the lower prices received 

 for the marketed product of the whole dairy or creamery. If 

 we are to keep our hold on the markets of the East, we must 

 make better goods than the Western men do, or they will drive 

 us out of our home butter markets as surely as they did out of 

 the beef markets years ago. 



We cannot gainsay the fact that our northern agriculture is 

 handicapped by long, cold winters. Unless the greatest care and 

 protection are given all classes of animals suffer from their 

 intense severity. We have long recognized this, and know well 

 how to keep them warm. Far too many of us who have provided 

 them with warmth and shelter have forced them to breathe over 

 and over the poisonous exhalation from their own and each 

 other's lungs. We have contrived or adopted systems of venti- 

 lation which in the great majority of cases, are far from adequate. 

 How often we find little eight or ten inch square ventilating 

 boxes running from the tie-up, up the walls of the barn and 

 opening out of doors, under the plates at the eaves. These little 

 shutes, scarcely a dozen feet long, are weak in their capacities for 

 the removal of the vitiated air. In the "lower barn" at the Maine 

 Experiment Station, I constructed shutes, one by three feet in 

 size, which extend from the tie-up up the walls to the plate, and 

 then up the roof to the cupolas at the ridge of the barn. They 

 are closely made and do not admit air along their sides to hinder 



