'New York Agricultural Experiment Station. 61 



It will be noted that each of the above comparisons was made 

 on the basis of short-period tests of the two methods of milking 

 and in practically all cases the cows used in these tests were not 

 accustomed to milking machines. All of these workers have been 

 familiar with the fact that cows are adverse to changes in their 

 habits and decrease their milk flow when changes are instituted. 

 They adopted this unsatisfactory method of experimentation with 

 a recognition of its limitations because they were making pre- 

 liminary explorations of a new field and did not think it wise 

 to risk their animals on longer experiments until the safety of 

 the procedure had been fairly demonstrated. 



While Price^ did not conduct any short time experiments on 

 this subject he reported observations from an 18-months' use of 

 the milking machine. Contrasting the yields with machine milk- 

 ing with those previously obtained by hand he concluded that 

 " Some cows give more milk by machine milking and others less. 

 Present knowledge indica-tes that machine milking is as efficient 

 as hand milking under average conditions." 



The futility of short time experiments was strongly emphasized 

 by Haecker and Little.^ They conducted a number of trials of 

 this kind and concluded that " The two methods of milking are so 

 radically different in operation that when the milker was sub- 

 stituted for hand labor the cows did not milk out completely. 

 The amount of strippings increased as the experiment progressed, 

 plainly indicating that the method (of experimentation) was 

 detrimental." They also gave the yield from 20 cows milked 

 through an entire lactation period with the machine and in the 

 case of 11 cows contrasted these results with the yield from one 

 or more lactation periods with hand milking. "With 10 of the 11 

 cows the yield with machine milking was less than the average 

 of the available records of the particular cow. In a number of 

 instances the decrease was quite marked. 



1 Price, Jas. N. Home grown rations in economical production of milk 

 and butter. Tenn. Agr. Exp. Station Bui. 80. June 1908. 



2 Haecker, A. L., and Little, E. M. Milking machines. Neb. Agr. Exp. 

 Station Bui. 108. Dec. 1908. 



