448 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



or the amount or value of the butter made. There have been, 

 before this year, considerable decreases in the amount of but- 

 ter made, but the causes of the decrease have been easily 

 pointed out. A critical comparison of the amounts of butter 

 made in the different counties and different parts of the State, 

 will show that there has been a considerable increase in the 

 last year in the northern and northeastern part of the state — 

 usually designated the dairy districts ; but the largest amount 

 of. increase of creamery made butter has been in the southern 

 half of the State. This part of the State, with the exception 

 of a few counties, has never been known as a dairy section 

 at all, and until the introduction of the hand separator and 

 the practice of shipping cream to large central churning sta- 

 tions, the dairy business of the southern half of the State was 

 very small. It never amounted to enough in a locality, so that 

 creamery building was successful, except, of course, in a few 

 instances; but the establishment of the central plants and the 

 shipping of cream by rail made possible the practice of the 

 dairy business by an individual without any particular co-opera- 

 tion on the part of his neighbors. For this reason, there are 

 dozens of localities south of the center of the State where the 

 dairy business has trebled and cjuadrupled in the last eighteen 

 months, to the very great advantage of the farmers in those 

 counties. Without the centralizing plants and the railway facil- 

 ities for cream shipping, this dairy business would not exist 

 at all for the reason that the profits in farm-made butter are 

 very small indeed, as compared with those of creamery-rriade 

 butter. Twenty of these larger plants make a total of 17,627,- 

 000 pounds of butter, — twenty per cent of the total for the 

 State. There can be no doubt that the principle of centraliza- 

 tion of the creamery industry has been of very great value 

 to the farmers of the southern and western parts of the State, 

 where previously no creamery facilities were within their 

 reach; and ecjually without doubt, the buttermaking industry 

 of those parts of the State will_, for a considerable time, at any 

 rate, be controlled by the central plants; and, except in a few 

 localities where the successful local creameries are now oper- 

 ated, the farmer will be compelled to choose between giving up 



