246 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



whey aud slop-water are conducted ofi', and not allowed to grow 

 fungus aud breed Mies to annoy you and injure the products of 

 your factory. All your surroundings must be airy, clean and 

 sweet, and provision must be made for keeping them so. One 

 would think common sense would suggest this. But in central 

 New York, either our dairymen have turned a deaf ear to the 

 teaching of common sense, or common sense has not done her 

 duty. Perhaps it will be different here. 



Secure Justice to the Producer. One great drawback in the 

 factory system — an evil that must aud can be remedied — is the 

 crediting of the patron with the number of pounds of liquid which 

 he draws to the factory, instead of the real value of what he 

 delivers. Every patron should be given credit according to the 

 value of his milk — neither more nor less. Under the present sys- 

 tem of crediting by weight, the man who brings poor milk gets 

 too much credit, and the man who brings good milk gets too little 

 credit, if we take value into consideration. This is a very great 

 evil, aside from the injustice it does. It in effect offers a premium 

 to brutality and dishonesty, while it discourages the honest man 

 who keeps his cows well and brings rich milk, unwatered, to the 

 factory. I publicly called attention to this subject nearly two years 

 ago. I concluded with these remarks: "The quality of the milk 

 is nowhere taken into consideration. The man who has a well- 

 selected dairy, keeps it well, and delivers milk that will turn out, 

 for the season, a hundred pounds of cheese for every nine hundred 

 pounds of milk, gets no more returns for a given number of pounds 

 of milk than the man who delivers milk so poor that twelve hun- 

 dred pounds of it will not make more than a hundred pounds of 

 cheese, or the same as the former's nine hundred pounds. There 

 is a difference of about twenty-five per cent, in the quality of the 

 milk turned out by the good and the poor dairies. Some means 

 should be devised for remedying this piece of injustice, if the bet- 

 ter class of dairies is to be retained b}' the factories." 



I have seen no cause to change my opinion since I wrote those 

 sentences. The subject is beginning to attract the attention of 

 our leading dairymen. At the last Convention of the American 

 Dairymen's Association a committee of five was appointed to 

 consider the question of giving credit to patrons according to 

 value instead of according to weight. Of course, weight or mea- 

 sure will have to form the base of any system adopted. But 

 many now believe it possible, by the use of the lactometer and 



