290 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



was expensive to them. The revenue department says butter containing 

 16 per cent or more moisture shall be called adulterated butter, on which 

 you must pay 10 cents tax, $500i a year license for making, and the revenue 

 officers wherever they can find a big enough bunch have been collecting 

 that tax, and every here and there we find some fellow that has to pay 

 the penalty. When this butter goes in storage and then on the market 

 all of us pay the tax, because we get poor butter for it, and if we find 

 anything better than butter we will buy it in the end whether oleomar- 

 garine or not. 



Another thing that helped reduce the quality of butter, for which the 

 buttermaker is responsible partly, and a great many others are also 

 responsible in a way, and that is the method by which we have been 

 taking in hand separator cream. I have always maintained that cream 

 can be produced just as fine from farm separators as from any other sep- 

 arator. The separator does not do the bad work, but it is the way the 

 separator is handled on the farms, the way we have allowed the farmers 

 to handle the separator, that has caused the trouble. We have been 

 watching this thing closely, have had a number of men in the field, have 

 watched the introduction of the separator in the whole milk creamery, 

 and have found almost invariably when the separator went in the quality 

 went lower. It is not the fault of the separator but the fault of the men 

 who operated the separator and the fault of the buttermaker in taking 

 bad cream from that separator. Now I know these things are easy to talk 

 about and hard to do. I think in the cream separator question that has 

 been true because there is not a fellow that has had anything to do with it 

 but wished he could eliminate the poor cream, and sometimes if he did 

 that he would eliminate all the cream he had and would go out of busi- 

 ness, and we have to meet that in some way. We have to find some way 

 to provide a more profitable business for the farmer to produce milk with- 

 out the separator or else show him how to use the separator and make 

 good cream, or else the quality of our butter will continue to go down. 

 There is a demand for good butter. We do not make enough butter in 

 this country, and yet we make too much of the poor kind. There is a 

 demand always for fresh, good butter. It will always sell at a premium, 

 and those of you who are making good butter know that, and those of 

 you who are making poor butter have found the difference in that, and 

 yet I do not believe today we are selling our butter just as we ought. 

 I think commission men in our cities would like to pay for our butter 

 according to worth if they could, but they have the same thing to con- 

 tend with as you have in the creameries, and you act just as bullheaded 

 about it as the farmers do, and there is where your trouble is. Now 

 there is a place where you could practice a few of the things you are 

 going to preach. I wish something could be done that would overcome 

 this difficulty without so much hard work and worry on your part, but 

 it seems we have to go through the ordeal and come out purified in the 

 end, I hope. I believe we will. 



Now one of the things I want to speak of briefly, and yet perhaps it 

 will be the most interesting thing I have touched on, is in regard to the 

 moisture in butter. We all know how hard it has been to find out what 

 our butter contained in moisture. It has been almost impossible to tell 



