THE DETROIT COMMISSION PLAN OF CITY MILK 



ADMINISTRATION.* 



Special Bulletin No. 99 



By W. O. Hedrick and A. C. Anderson_, 

 Departments of Economics and Dairy Hushandrij. 



The middlemau dispute of recent years in which the farmer is seeming- 

 ly made the dupe for the greed of the middleman class, has raged nowhere 

 more fiercely than around the commoditj^ milk. On the one hand con- 

 sumers of milk have been slow in sensing that milk is not merely a 

 beverage but is a food of high nutritive value and, therefore, have opposed 

 price increases in milk to the point of fury. On the other hand, 

 farmers with large fixed investments in herds and equipments have 

 found tlie costs of their dairy materials, cattle feed and exjiert help 

 constantly rising, leaving them with no profits when milk was sold at 

 the customary prices. In the same way city dealers have suffered from 

 high costs also and have neither been able to give former prices to the 

 consumer nor raise their payments to the dairyman producer.- 



The ruinous deadlocks or "milk wars" which have resulted in many 

 milk centers from this state of things seem to be the natural outcomes 

 from certain i)eculiarities in the fluid milk business which are not 

 easily changed. It is the purpose of this bulletin first to describe these 

 business traits which are peculiar to the milk trade and second to offer 

 for their control the city milk commission plan the merits of which for 

 this task will be shown to have no equal. 



COMMERCIAL MILK. 



The customary city and town demand for milk, while continuous, is 

 as a rule extremely variable. It changes witli the seasons and weather. 

 The summer and hot days being the times of high demand, winter 

 and cold days show a falling off. The average daily per capita 

 consumption of milk with Americans is nearly a pint, so that naturally 

 small units of milk are the customary deliveries of milk distributors. 

 On the other hand, the dealer must be prepared to furnish large amounts, 

 especiall}^ to restaurant and hotel keepers. 



The town and city demand for milk too, includes a wide range of 

 forms. Without the discussion of any of these in detail the naming 

 of such varieties as "certified", "Class A", "Class B", "modified", "pas- 

 teurized" and buttermilk, together with certain natural associates such 

 as cream, cottage cheese, and ice cream, gives some notion of the scope 

 of this demand. In addition lo these well-known and standardized 

 varieties several of them have many subdivisions so that taste wiih 



* The writers of this Bulletin desire to thank here Mr. C. H. Chillson of the Detroit Board of 

 Health, for the able assistance which he rendered in gathering material for this study. 



