No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, 835 



day, au aggregate of over l()l),()OU pounds (or 50 tons) of fresh (un- 

 salted) Norraand.v butter arrived, was tested, graded, sold, delivered 

 and paid for. The sales at this town sometimes exceed GO tons on 

 Mondays, but are less in quantity on Fridays. The butter purchased 

 was placed by the buyers in 13 different grades, with as many differ- 

 ent prices, ranging from 15 to 30 cents per pound and averaging 24 

 or 25 cents. 



Most of the butter bought at these country markets in Normandy 

 is taken for the proprietors of large establishments which are 

 really Mending factories, a kind of butter factory hardly known in 

 America. One of the oldest and best known of these is located 

 at Carentan. It is a big concern, employing at least 600 persons 

 altogether, receiving 25 to 40 tons of butter a day, in a dozen dif- 

 ferent grades, which is mechanically blended, repacked and sold 

 in four commercial grades. Sales amount sometimes to 100 tons a 

 day, although ordinarily only about 30 tons. The business of the 

 year aggregates 0,000 to 10,000 tons of butter, worth from four to 

 five million dollars. 



South of Normandy is the old province of Brittany with its ex- 

 cellent little dairy cows, black and white, and its entertaining and 

 picturesque peasantry. But the dairying of this region does not 

 differ much in character from that of Normandy. It is not as well 

 conducted and the butter product ranks lower in quality and price. 

 There is an agricultural college with a dairy school annex in Brit- 

 tany, and away to the west, not far from Brest, an excellent practi- 

 cal school of dairying for the daughters of peasant farmers. It is 

 thoroughly a dairymaid's establishment. 



Should one travel still farther south in France, keeping within 

 fifty miles or so of the west coast, the old province of Poitou would 

 be entered,' lying between the rivers Loire and Gironde. In this 

 district, and particularly in the Departments of Deux-Sevres, Ven- 

 dee, Charente and Lower Charente, is to be found the best French 

 development of the co-operative system of butter-making. The first 

 factory under this system was organized in 1888, with 88 patrons, 

 and produced that year 65,000 pounds of butter. There are now 

 more than one hundred of these co-operative creameries in the 

 region described, with 50,000 patrons, owning 125,000 cows and pro- 

 ducing annually about 17,000,000 pounds of butter. Most of these 

 establishments are less than 8 years old; they have organized in a 

 strong association. The industry in this region has been devel- 

 oped in a former wine-making country, where the vines were de- 

 stroyed, from ten to twenty years ago, by phyloxera. In the rest 

 of France there are another hundred creameries, but most of these 

 are proprietary. Half of them are in western departments and 

 the rest are scattered through other portions of the country. There 



