DAIRY MEETING. IS^ 



terial dirt. Cleanliness is the watchword for obtaining clean 

 milk in the stable, and scrupulous cleanliness must be the watch- 

 word in the milk room. Couple this with cooling the milk be- 

 low 50 F., and a clean milk from the milk room will keep sweet 

 until it reaches the consumer, and will not contain a bacterial 

 content much over that which it had when it left the producer. 



To produce such a milk as this is to produce a milk that will 

 not cause disease among the users. It is not producing "certi- 

 fied milk" by any means, but it is producing milk such as those 

 who use it for a food have a right to expect. It will, cost more 

 than it does to produce a milk in the old way, where no pre- 

 cautions are used; but, when the value of such precautions to 

 the consumer once becomes known, as well as the high food 

 value of milk, complaint on this score will in no way equal the 

 present complaint on account of dirty milk. 



These precautions seem so simple and common sense that one 

 is likely to take it for granted that they are always employed by 

 a producer of milk. We would naturally expect him to be clean 

 in the production of his food commodity. But long accustomed- 

 ness to the old methods of milk production and marketing have 

 led to a different conception of cleanliness in milk than in other 

 articles which we eat and wear. In addition, the dirt In milk 

 is easily hidden, and is seldom seen unless we look at the bottom 

 of the milk bottle. How many of us do this? If many of us 

 did we w^ould have a new idea of this common article of food. 



This condition of dirty milk is all too common, as is shown 

 both by the number of samples of milk which show visible dirt, 

 and by the great economic loss to the community through sick- 

 ness and death. Examination of our records for the past year 

 shows that 37% of the samples of milk that we have received 

 have shown such an amount of dirt that it was readily detected 

 by the naked eye. Such a proportion of dirty samples shows 

 the methods in use by the producers of our State to be far from 

 cleanly, and when we remember that this physical dirt in our 

 milk is but an index of the bacterial contamination, which is 

 more far-reaching in its effects on health, the conclusion seems 

 warranted that our milk supply is in very poor condition. Physi- 

 cal examination of the milk of the State thus shows that it 

 possesses possibilities of causing trouble through bacterial con- 

 tamination. The question arises as to whether or not milk does 

 cause disease, apart from epidemic disease. 



