SIXTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— ^PART V. 357 



the creamery as well as the quality of the butter. They not only have 

 a right to put up a fight for their business but it is their duty to them- 

 selves and to their creameries to do so. If the centralizer pays a cou- 

 ple of cents more in your locality than he does fifty miles away, wouldn't 

 it do some good to have that fact brought to the attention of your 

 people? In the long run it would. 



The farmer is really the man who is going to determine what the 

 creamery system of the future shall be. If the quality of butter made is 

 low, if the manufacturing and transportation expense are high, and if 

 therefore his returns are little, he will in some case quit the business; in 

 any case he'll look for more money with some other creamery. He does 

 not care about starters and pasteurization or high flavors or of the 

 proper temperature at which to store butter. It is dollars he is after 

 and the creamery that pays him the most dollars is the one that will 

 get his product. He will keep right on bringing you the dirty sour cream 

 as long as you pay him as much for it as you will for a good quality. 

 But when his cream is graded and he is paid for it on the basis of 

 what it is worth he will have every inducement to make it better. The 

 grading of cream at the creamery and the making of different grades 

 of butter will do more to give us better butter than all the laws in the 

 book and the efforts at moral suasion that can be devised. 



The creamery business is a part of the agricultural life of this state. 

 The farmers are going to keep on milking cows in the future, because 

 they must. There is to be progress in the future as in the past, but 

 he is going to demand a reduction in the expense between him and his 

 market and he is going to get it. No system that adds to the net expense 

 can endure. Under present conditions the local well managed creamery 

 of suitable size has the advantage over any other system both in regard 

 to necessary and inevitable expense, but in regard to possible quality 

 as well, for the reason that it is a cheaper manner of doing the busi- 

 ness than any yet devised. I know too well that the theory and the 

 practice are too often different but the successful local creamery of 

 the future must measure up pretty nearly to the standard or be elimi- 

 nated by the competition of some better method. 



DISCUSSION. 



Mr. Edwards : I would like to ask Mr. Wright how he 

 expects co-operative creameries to make butter from second grade 

 cream at a second grade price, when centralizers pay for it regard- 

 less of quality ? 



