232 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



their cream it is going to be a blessing to you; if you are not, 

 we are going to take advantage of your downfall. 



J. G. Moore, Wisconsin: One criticism I wish to make in 

 regard to Mr. Smarzo's paper is that he mentions homemade 

 starter in no complimentary terms. He should have downed it 

 and downed it good. The homemade starter will get the man 

 who uses it into trouble. In support of this assertion I wish to 

 state an incident which happened right in Wisconsin. You will 

 remember the National Buttermakers' Convention held its meet- 

 ing in Milwaukee, and the man who made the butter that 

 secured the gold medal at that time made his butter with what 

 is called a " natural starter." I would like to ask if any of you 

 have heard from him since ? Have you ? Has anyone heard 

 of that man since ? No, you have never heard of him because 

 he is depending on the natural starter, and it is not what it is 

 represented to be. If you want to be successful in the use of 

 starters, use a commercial starter. 



Mr. Kieffer : There seems to be a sort of misunderstanding, 

 I think, among the buttermakers in regard to a homemade 

 starter. Now I find in my travels that when you speak to a 

 buttermaker about starters, he will say, "I use a homemade 

 starter," and when you ask him how he prepared that starter, 

 you will find it was simply by catching skim milk from the sepa- 

 rator, heating it at eighty degrees and letting it sour. I do not 

 call that homemade starter. I may be wrong, but I do not have 

 that kind of starter in mind when I speak of homemade starter 

 and the kind of starter you have in you entry blanks. When 

 you say homemade starter, I have in mind that you had some- 

 thing to do with preparing that starter; that you did something, 

 that it did not spur naturally . That is not the natural milk that 

 you caught from your separators, but I think it is something 

 you did. A homemade starter is, I think, a starter of this kind : 

 that you take a quart of nice sweet milk, as fresh from the cow 

 as you can get it; put it into a mason jar, held at a temperature 

 of seventy-five degrees until thick; then you pasteurize some 

 skim milk or whole milk and inoculate that pasteurized milk with 

 this previously prepared mother starter, and by using this pas- 

 teurized milk that was prepared with starter that you carry is 

 what I term a homemade starter, and not the starter that is 

 caught naturally from the milk and allowed to sour without 

 being inoculated with a bacteria. 'The natural starter is the 



