342 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



up. My conscience used to trouble me, or perhaps it was not my con- 

 science, for they say when a man makes butter he has no conscience, but 

 the manager and I used to tallc about selling water in New York city for 

 butter and we decided it was not right. Then the time came when every- 

 body was doing it and our creamery, with the others, had to fall in line 

 or go out of business. The centralizing plants had us scared to death, but 

 we have no fear of them now, not the slightest, because, as we heard 

 several times yesterday, if a co-operative creamery is run on the right plan 

 no centralizer on earth can beat it in price. A co-operative creamery can 

 pay from three to five cents more in spite of anything the centralizer can 

 do, even if they sell 23 per cent to 25 per cent of water, as I have heard 

 of them doing. I have tested butter that I churned that had 23 per cent 

 of water, but I was very careful to see there was only one churning like 

 that. With the apparatus we have today, the Gray and Irish moisture 

 tests, and the right kind of bottle, we can come very close to telling what 

 we are doing each day. Churn your butter at 52 in the summer, work it 

 enough and salt right, but remember about the package. Have the pack- 

 age appear right. Then Mr. Ross said something about marking the tubs. 

 Well, I used 'to do that; do yet when I have a churning of butter that I 

 think it very bad. I do not claim to make the butter that I did five years 

 ago. Seven years ago, when I first came to Alden, we were getting thirty 

 thousand pounds of milk a day. Now if we get eight hundred pounds in 

 three days we think we are doing well. We are making more butter to- 

 day than we did then. 



We as buttermakers must keep abreast of the times and not get twenty 

 years behind, as Prof. McKay said last night. There is no excuse for 

 falling behind. We must keep abreast of the times, and if we have a poor 

 batch of butter mark it and notify your commission house to look out for 

 whatever mark you put on that particular package, and in ninety-nine 

 cases out of a hundred, indeed, I might say in the one hundred cases, 

 you will lose nothing on the butter. The commission house that is hand- 

 ling your goods will see you through on it. We have a commission house, 

 or the commission house has us, to which we have been shipping goods 

 during the entire time I have made butter with the exception of a ship- 

 ment or two that we would send somewhere else for experiment, but we 

 would come back home again. I do not know whether we will ever quit 

 that hpuse or not; certainly will not if I have anything to say about it. 

 Notify your house if you have butter that is off grade and give them a 

 fair show. 



Be careful about your refrigerator. I saw some score cards the other 

 day in a whole milk creamery and I noticed on four or five of the cards 

 "mouldy tubs." I do not know that the buttermaker is to blame for that. 

 That does not have much to do with the manufacture of butter, but it has 

 something to do with the finished product. Be careful of your tubs, soak 

 them right, pack them neatly, do your work well, as though you were do- 

 ing it for yourself. Be careful about expense. Chief Webster told us 

 yesterday about it costing 1% cents to manufacture butter. It cost us a 

 little over 1 cent a pound to manufacture our butter during the month of 

 October. 



