SIXTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK-PART V. 351 



SANITARY AND PRACTICAL IMPROVEMENTS IN PRESENT 

 CREAMERY MACHINERY. 



F. C. OLTROGGE, TRIPOLI, lA. 



In this age of great progress, the strife that is manifested every- 

 where, is sanitation and simplicity. More has been Nvritten for the bene- 

 fit of sanitary conditions during the past number of years, than on 

 any other subject I linow of. Millions of dollars are spent every year 

 by this great Republic for sanitation, and millions more will be spent 

 before perfection is reached, and the same is true in particular of the 

 creamery industry of this and other states, as we travel through the 

 country and see creamery buildings dotted everywhere, we find some 

 apparently neat and clean, at least as far as the operator can con- 

 sistently keep it, and keep himself looking anywhere near tidy, and 

 that sort of creamery and operator I shall only base my remarks in 

 mention of them. My intentions are, only to show or to point out that 

 part of unsanitary condition existing in such creameries, that are kept 

 reasonably tidy, and to those operators whose motto is "cleanliness" 

 as well personally as it is in their every day work in the creamery. 



Let us see if it is possible in our present creameries and with 

 present machineries therein, to keep them in first-class sanitary con- 

 ditions, without the operator or buttermaker becoming the slave to 

 the impossible satisfying criticiser. He whose duty it is to handle and 

 manufacture a product intended for human food one minute, and the 

 next minute get on his knees, and scrub or wipe machinery which dur- 

 ing the operation has bespatted itself, with grease or milk in places 

 almost, inaccessible, and left exposed by the unthinking designer of 

 such machinery. Yet the operator must keep himself looking neat, for 

 he is expected to wait on some lady customer at almost any time who 

 may want a few pounds of butter or a pint of cream who are not aware 

 what kind of work he had done just before her coming in. Or some 

 Traveling solicitor may step in and find the buttermaker's clothes are 

 not tidy, because he was just cleaning or adjusting some machinery, 

 and to one not familiar with such work cannot understand why that 

 buttermaker is so dirty. 



They don't knoAv that when a working gear on some churn springs 

 a leak, that it means the removal of perhaps several gear wheels in 

 order to repack or tighten some stuffing box, and the gear wheels to 

 be removed have been so besmeared with grease, caused by the leak 

 besides the necessary oil put on such gears, is not a 'kid glove job' or 

 he may have been at work cleaning the lower sides of a square bot- 

 tom vat 5 feet wide and 10 or more feet long and all the way from 

 4 to 12 inches from the floor. Do any of you imagine that it is easy? 

 Y'et did it ever occur to you that you were present when such vats were 

 undergoing repairs or taken out to be discarded that you found the under- 

 neath of that vat filthy, and probably the thought struck you that that 

 buttermaker was not neat, or no wonder that that creamery smelled 

 bad, and such fellows I would like to ask. did you ever try to keep 



