No. « DBPAHTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 4M 



ME. COOK: No, only indirectly. If the character of our milk is 

 such as we ought to have, it must be produced under certain con- 

 ditions of sanitation. 



GENERAL BEAVER: I mean whether you treat as a special 

 feature the effect of milk upon the human family in your lecture? 



MR. COOK: No, sir. You have doctors and professional men 

 who know all about these things, and I do not go into that because 

 I find that within the limits of the time allotted, I have more than 

 enough to talk about anyway without trespassing upon grounds 

 with which I am not familiar. 



I am not disposed to waste time in generalities at all and so I 

 want to get to this subject. I am not here this morning to talk to 

 you people, let that be understood at the outset. I want to talk 

 with you. It makes a difference whether you are talking to a man 

 or talking with him. If you are talking with him, he will do half 

 the work, and that is very much easier than when you are talking 

 to him for then he expects you will do it all. When I started out 

 six years ago to work along these lines, I found that fifteen minutes 

 or half an hour was a long time, but the subject has grown so big it 

 takes a good deal longer time now and it has become rather a ques- 

 tion of packing it into a little time. I spent an hour each day of last 

 week working with the students of our State College along this line 

 of barn construction and barn sanitation, which I believe is one of 

 the most important questions that we have to deal with to-day, espe- 

 cially on our dairy farms, for several reasons: First, milk is one of 

 the cheapest human foods that we have, and one of the best, a food 

 that is almost entirely digested and a very important food that con- 

 tributes to the means of living for so many men, and getting to be a 

 great commercial proposition — the selling of milk. 



From that point of view, I believe we ought to look seriously at 

 the production side of it that we may make it possible for the people 

 in the cities to get better milk, and cleaner milk, and in my judgment 

 that will largely settle the, question of price, and unless we have an 

 understanding of the methods of barn construction and the princi- 

 ples that govern it, it has been my experience and observation that 

 we do not reach the results we ought to have. A gentleman last 

 winter asked me to go out with him to see how he could best put in 

 a system of ventilation. When we walked into the barn — it was 

 one of those older stables with a low ceiling — I took out my knife 

 and went right up through the ceiling. I said, you don't need ven- 

 tilation here, you have got so much ventilation now that if you 

 could market this ventilation it would bring you more money than 

 your milk product. I said when it is warm outdoors, it is warm in 

 this barn, and when it is cold outdoors it is cold in here. He didn't 

 have an idea of the first principles of ventilation. When we go into 

 one of those barns — one of those old fellows where you can almost 

 throw cats through by the tail — there is no use of bothering about 

 ventilation. The first thing that man wants to do is to buy some 

 lumber and paper and build over in a proper manner. 



What we need to do in our cow stables, is to conserve the heat of 

 the animal, and still give them pure air. Now how shall we p;et it? 

 The further north you go the more necessary it will be to have, what 



