!New York Agricultural Experiment Station. 753 



money or saved labor, which, under present conditions, amounts 

 to the same thing to the producer. It should also be noted that 

 with the exception of the tuberculin test there was no single day 

 when any one of the above conditions could have been said to have 

 changed from good to bad. The resulting bad conditions were the 

 cumulative result of a gradual lowering of the standard of doing 

 business. 



In attempting to locate the cause for this marked deterioration 



in sanitary conditions it should be remembered that not a letter of 



the city milk ordinances has been changed, that the 



Cause of form of milk inspection has been continued, that 



change in the milk is still sold by the producer to the retailer 



sanitary under the same form of contract which was in 



conditions, force when advancement was most rapid. In short, 

 every external form and legal enactment which 

 accompanied one of the most striking recorded cases of municipal 

 improvement of a milk supply is still in force and yet within less 

 than two years the sanitary conditions surrounding the milk pro- 

 duction have returned essentially to the condition in which they 

 were at the beginning of the original improvement. 



Under the sliding scale contracts as explained on page 4 the 

 wholesale price of milk increased one-half cent per quart in passing 

 from " medium " to " good " or from " good " to " excellent." 

 As explained in Bulletin 337 the increased expense connected with 

 bringing a dairy ranking as " medium " into the " good " class was 

 ordinarily confined to that of the labor connected with keeping the 

 cows and their surroundings cleaner and in cooling the milk. As 

 the production of " medium " milk at 3 cents per quart was finan- 

 cially unprofitable and the expense attending the change to the 

 " good " grade amounted to less than one-half cent per quart the 

 dairies all came up to the " good " grade. In bringing the dairy 

 up to the " excellent " grade the farmer not only incurred an in- 

 creased expense for cleanliness and cooling of his milk but also 

 faced the problem of maintaining a herd which would pass the tuber- 

 culin test. The extent of loss in connection with reacting animals 

 was so uncertain that the majority of the farmers hesitated to take 

 the chance even with a margin of one-half cent per quart. So far 

 as information is available all those who took the chance found it 

 financially profitable. 



The situation which existed during 1911 may be summarized by 

 saying that the farmers produced fairly sanitary milk because it 

 was the quality which they could produce most profitably. 



Under conditions which existed during the latter part of 1912, 

 when the official grading of the dairies merely retained them at the 

 highest grade which they had previously reached, the financial 

 stimulus for the production of cleaner milk was weakened if not 

 entirely removed. Although the farmers exercised progressively less 



48 



