DAIRY AND SEED IMPROVEMENT MEETINGS. 221 



MILKING MACHINES. 



By Prof. L. S. Corbett, Orono. 



The labor connected with the routine work of milking is one 

 of the most exacting operations on the ordinary farm. No one 

 task about the farm is quite so uninviting or even loathsome to 

 the hired man as milking by hand the long line of cows twice a 

 day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. It is very diffi- 

 cult for the dairyman to get and keep good, reliable, cleanly, 

 gentle, efficient milkers who will stay with him the year around. 

 The labor cost of milking is considerable, much more than the 

 ordinary dairyman realizes. In order to get the best results, 

 each cow should be milked regularly and by the same milker. 

 She should be treated kindly and milked out as clean as possible. 

 In many cases it is necessary to keep more help than would 

 otherwise be needed in order to have men available at milking 

 time. Frequently the number of cows which a dairyman can 

 keep is limited by the number of milkers which he is able to 

 obtain. Not infrequently a man finds himself with insufficient 

 help for milking his herd and occasionally a man gives up the 

 dairy business simply because oi the impossibility of getting 

 satisfactory help at prices warranted by the returns from the 

 business. 



Manual labor is one of the most expensive things which the 

 farmer has to buy and, wherever possible, he makes use of ma- 

 chinery in doing his work. In this way he lessens the number 

 of men he has to employ. During the past few years many of 

 the common farm operations have been made easier and very 

 much cheaper because of the improved machinery which has 

 been developed for agricultural purposes. If the milking could 

 be done also by machinery the work would be made very much 

 easier and the cost of the operation might be very materially 

 decreased. This operation, however, seems until recently to 



