110 THIRTIETH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE 



cock in creameries and cheese factories where the money re- 

 turned to the patrons is to be decided by the arbitration of the 

 Babcock, such absolute accuracy and such painstaking care 

 in all of the details of the manipulation are not necessary 

 on the part of the man using- the Babcock test to throw light 

 upon the mysteries of the sale milk business. If he finds 

 three and one-half or four per cent, of fat in the neck of the 

 test bottle he knows that there is at least as much as that in 

 his milk '.and if his work has been inaccurate it has been in 

 underestimating- rather than in overestimating the quality of 

 his milk. He has made a test which is sufficiently accurate 

 to enable him to have a clear conception of the quality of the 

 article in which he deals. 



Those who oppose a statute standard for milk portray the 

 milkman's burden as a constant wrestling with a great mys- 

 tery and uncertainty, with the constant danger of being 

 pulled into court. This is all wrong. There is no mystery 

 or uncertainty about the quality of the milk, and no sword of 

 Damocles hanging over the milkman's head. The milk of 

 different cows varies sometimes as much as from ten to sixteen 

 per cent, of total solids. The milk of a single animal varies 

 from day to day but usually not over one per cent., going at 

 once back to the average. But the mixed milk of a herd of 

 cows with good treatment will be extemely uniform and vary 

 but little from day to day the year round. Many experi- 

 ment stations and private dairymen have found that the 

 mixed milk from the same animals varies hardly more than .2 

 of one per cent, the year around. 



The notion that food influences the quality of milk dies 

 hard. When milk runs low in quality the Boston milk con- 

 tractors even now sometimes write to the producer that he 

 must feed more grain, but this will not help the trouble. Last 

 winter's legislature in Massachusetts dropped the Standard 

 for September from thirteen to twelve per cent, in the foolish 

 and unscientific argument that September is the month in 

 which corn fodder is fed to a great extent, and that milk of 

 average quality cannot be produced on corn fodder. Such a 

 statement was manifestly ridiculous and no just ground for 

 changing the standard. 



Climatic conditions may change the quality of milk tempo- 

 rarily. Your own state experiment station showed at one 

 time that when the daily temperature of one summer was 

 plotted on a sheet of paper, and the daily analysis of milk of 

 a herd of cows was also plotted on the same sheet, the lines 

 representing these two conditions were almost exactly the 

 reverse of each other. In other words when the thermometer 

 registered up in the nineties and the weather became enervat- 



