BUTTER. 299 



rule for several 3'ears, the second grade of creamery or factory made 

 butter, has sold quicker and at higher prices in our eastern markets, 

 than our own New Kiiglanrl farm butter. Day after da}' butter made 

 more than 1,000 miles away comes rolling into Boston by the car- 

 load, and sells in your own market at the highest prices, crowding 

 out or down the butter of 3'our own farms. This is not a pleasing 

 condition of affairs for New England farmers, and it is full time the 

 matter received careful attention. To a close observer and student 

 of the subject, just two things can be found as causing this success- 

 ful, onward march of Western made butter : 



1st. The activity and enterprise of the butter makers out there ; 

 their organizations and the good resulting from numberless meet- 

 ings. 



2d. Their wise abandonment of the old way of private farm 

 dairying, and the substitution of the factory or "Creamery" 

 system of cooperative dairying. 



Please notice that it is not simply western butter, but creamery 

 butter that has stood at the head of the market quotations for the 

 last four or five years. During this period creamery butter has 

 made for itself a great reputation, based upon uniform high quality'. 

 Here is a combination of two very important points : high quality 

 and uniformity. We all know the unevenness that exists in a 

 thousand pounds of butter made on lift}- different farms, and even 

 in the butter of a single farm in successive weeks. This uneven- 

 ness makes such a lot of butter hard to sell in the large markets, 

 every package has to be inspected and classified. But under the 

 factor}' system the cream from the fifty farms being brought together 

 into one mass everj' daj' and made up, day after day, on exacth' the 

 same plan, by a [)erson who is an expert and who does nothing but 

 make butter the year round, a product of a thousand pounds results 

 of perfect uniformity, and in this way it is possible to maintain this 

 uniformity throughout the year. It is plain that this uniformity 

 gives a great advantage in the market to the factory or creamery 

 butter. A single package only from a car load of tons has to be 

 examined to classify the lot. Dealers are better satisfied and so are 

 consumers. And a factoiy which makes a thousand pounds a da}' 

 ( there are man}' such ), may soon establish such a reputation as to 

 sell its whole product in advance and without any inspection, just 

 as the best single dairies do. So this one point of uniformity of 

 product gives the factory butter a very great advantage. But 



