312 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



many things to do not written in our contract. Your work covers many 

 fields outside of mere buttermaking, and if you aye not familiar with 

 handling or repairing machinery, or with any of the other numerous 

 details of your work, post yourself at once, for it is very easy this 

 day and age to find out almost anything right at your own creamery 

 door, and there is absolutely no excuse for you. 



As matters stand in many of the local creameries at the present 

 time, a buttermaker is apt to lose his position by being too particular 

 about the very matters that he should be strongest in, but the butter- 

 maker must have a free hand and full charge of the creamery and its 

 details. This should be coupled with a harmonious working head, a 

 few competent men who dictate the financial policy of the creamery. 

 The smaller the number composing this head, the quicker will be the 

 continued success. It naturally follows that the governing body of a 

 creamery should be honest men with unselfish motives. To be sure, 

 these men are many times poorly paid, but it seems to me that the 

 value of a creamery as a home market for the farmers' product alone, 

 Is incentive enough for a manager or secretary, even if underpaid and 

 though he may have to hear everybody's troubles, I say he should be 

 public-spirited enough to bend every effort toward this success, and 

 should be untiring in working out the many problems that are before 

 him. 



The success then of the farmers' creamery is that it has one head, 

 competent, diligent and honest, an untiring up-to-date buttermaker who 

 is absolutely fearless in maintaining right and insisting on all con- 

 nected with him in doing their work promptly. Not forgetting that he 

 should be consulted in selling the butter and in all changes or improve- 

 ments in his plant. With this condition existing you will find very 

 few mistakes made, and too, you will see from year to year the same 

 buttermaker and officers laboring together in an unrewarded channel. 



In speaking of this I wish to refer to something I read in one of 

 the Minnesota papers last year. One of the instructors was writing to 

 the buttermakers of the State and said something like this: "Boys, 

 the annual meeting is drawing near; keep out of it." Well now I cannot 

 agree with that man. If I have a board of directors that are a body of 

 sensible men, if I have a secretary and manager that are sensible 

 men, with good business ability, I believe it is my place as a but- 

 termaker to do all I can to get that board of directors and that secretary 

 and manager re-elected for the ensuing year, because you know at an 

 annual meeting a name may be mentioned for some responsible position 

 on the board, and in nine times out of ten, whether the man is competent 

 to fill that place or not, he is elected. So I insist that it is my duty as a 

 buttermaker to do all that lays in my power to see that we have a com- 

 petent board. Furthermore, I believe if the buttermaker is a competent 

 man, if he is willing to do what is right and has the confidence of the 

 people, is what you might say the manager of the creamery. I do not 

 believe that my board of directors at the Lamont Creamery would buy a 

 thing without consulting me in regard to it, because who knows better 

 what the creamery needs than the buttermaker? Who understands the 

 needs of the creamery better than the buttermaker? 



