518 BOARD OF AGEICULTUEE, 



wool?" And, after some thought, he said: "I don't know." The Dutch- 

 man saj^s: "Well, I tell you," he says, "it is because there was more 

 white sheep." 



Now, to get a better price for butter we must make better butter. 

 It is a characteristic of mankind, and especially farmer kind, to want a 

 little higher price for the products they have to sell, and it does not seem 

 to occur to them that their products are not just the very best to be had. 

 It hardly seems possible, but there is more butter made on the farm than 

 in creameries, and the greater part of this farm dairy butter is of poor 

 quality. It is mottled, greasy, off in flavor and put up in poor packages 

 and sold to grocers, who care more for the .$10 worth of trade they are 

 getting than the $1 worth of butter they are buying. Some of this is 

 really pretty good butter, and worth all or more than the price the grocer 

 pays for it. The next farmer that comes along has butter that is not 

 worth 10 cents a pound, but he knows that the gi'ocer has paid 15 cents 

 to farmer A, who has just been there, and of course his wife can make 

 just as good butter as A's wife, and he must have the same price. It 

 would be unwise for the grocer to tell him the truth about the butter, 

 for he can not afford to lose that .$10 in trade, and so he simply says noth- 

 ing about the 50 cents' loss he sustains on the poor butter. 



Now what does the grocer do with the butter thus obtained? He can 

 not sell the most of it to his trade. He dumps it all together and it is 

 sold, not at 15 cents, but at 10 cents a pound to process butter-makors. 

 These process butter-makers melt it and blow the bad odors out of it 

 and work it over into second-hand butter, but the blast that has been 

 sent through it does not purge it of all its sins. It has lost its reputation 

 at the hands of the farmer, and, while it may be better than it was, it 

 can never be what it might have been if it had been made right and 

 dressed up in a nice suit of clothes to begin with. 



There are dozens of these process factories turning out tons of butter 

 daily, and it is a sad commentary on farm dairy butter-making to know 

 that a supply of material for such a vast business is possible. Think of 

 the dollars that might be going into the pockets of the farmers if they 

 would do differently. Instead of going to the trouble of making a poor 

 article with poor facilities, and losing a third of the butter-fat in skim 

 milk and butter milk, and selling it at 15 cents, for the grocer to lose 5 

 cents on, they might be getting 20 cents at the creamery. 



Let us stop and look at the defects of farm dairy butter. Perhaps we 

 had better go two steps farther back, and observe that in the first place 

 the farmer may be keeping cows that do not pay for their board, and he 

 charges the butter business with not being profitable, when the cause is 

 with the poor cows. The milk is handled by antiquated methods, eith-r 

 by raising the cream by gravity or dilution methods. Let me say right 

 here that by the dilution method about ono-third of the butter -fat is lost, 

 beside making a poor flavor. The price obtained for this butter-fat ihat 



