SIXTH ANNUAL YEAR-BOOK — PART V. 387 



as milk. Note again, that we need one butter maker for every two hun- 

 dred or perhaps everj- two thousand millv producers. How many milk pro- 

 ducers do we have at our regular or special college courses? Three hun- 

 dred to every butter maker? Two hundred to every butter maker? Or 

 even ten to every butter maker? No, not even pne, not even as many 

 milk producers as butter makers. In this convention the number ot 

 butter makers is greater than the number of milk producers. Education 

 in butter production in American is unbalanced in that the main 

 emphasis is laid upon the butter maker rather than on the milk pro- 

 ducer. If the graduates of our dairy school are scarcely able to properly 

 care for a separator and cream where shall the milk producer appear? In 

 the quality of the butter the maker has an important part to play but he 

 is at the mercy of the milk producers. The more of the process we can 

 leave in the hands of the skilled maker and the less we can leave in the 

 hands of the untrained farmer, the better for the reputation of American 

 dairy products. A man who makes so-called butter in a concern which 

 receives cream of all grades and accepts it, as it is bound to do without 

 reference to race, color, or previous condition of servitude, writes me that 

 his product is piebald, ringstreaked, speckled and spotted as far as flavor 

 is concerned and necessarily must be so. He writes "We make three tons 

 of stuff per day. It is as good as I can make from cream without pedi- 

 gree. I churn on Friday the cream from milk drawn on Monday morn- 

 ing, run through the separator unwashed on the sacred Sabbath evening, 

 mixed hot with cream cold from the Sabbath, kept in a half barrel of 

 water supposed to refrigerate it but so insufficient in quantity as to really 

 keep it warm, then shipped to a way station on the main line, reaching 

 there Tuesday night, shipped out Wednesday noon on a slow train and 

 reaching here Thursday morning; in what condition you can imagine. I" 

 pasteurize at once, then add a starter, in amount twenty-five per cent of 

 the weight of the cream a starter all right in quality. The butter is not 

 badly off flavor when it leaves the factory but if I mistake not will be so 

 fishy that it can swim within a week after it rieaches the seaport." 



When our dairy schools shall reach the masses, when the common 

 farmers, the average men, shall attend the institutes and read station 

 bulletins and the rural press when the sun of the millenium is project- 

 ing its earlist rays over the eastern horizon we may safely leave the care 

 of the separator and the cream to the farmers. A few men in Michigan 

 are taking splendid care of their cream on the farm. They are redeeming 

 the gathered cream system from utter condemnation. I admit that the 

 use of the hand separator saves hauling the milk to the factory and the 

 skim milk back. Even more it saves the spread of tuberculosis. I assume 

 the statement to be true that of all the hogs condemned as tuberculous 

 at the stock yards in Chicago last year, fully 90 per cent came from dairy 

 districts and received the disease through separator skim milk brought 

 home from the factory worked on the whole milk plan. This to me is 

 the chief argument favoring the gathered cream system. When it comes 

 to quality, commend me to the system that takes the milk to the factory, 

 separates it there and cares f-or the cream in properly equipped receptacles 

 managed by an expert. 



