364 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



to the facts. The law is a proper one and the department having its en- 

 forcement is competent and energetic. 



The effect of recent agitation for a proper amount of overrun in 

 creameries has resulted in too many cases in efforts on the part of the 

 buttermaker to increase the amount of water present and that without 

 taking any pains to know how much water is present in the butter when 

 it is shipped to market. Assistant dairy commissioners have tested butter 

 at various creameries and have found butter containing all the way from 

 7 per cent to 28 per cent of water, and in every case where abnormal 

 quantities of water have been discovered, the buttermaker was wholly 

 ignorant of the fact and asserted that his overrun as shown by the secre- 

 tary's books was only about what it ought to be. Such condition of ig- 

 norance will certainly result in the payment of penalties for violation of 

 the national law relating to water in butter. 



There are three forms of apparatus now sold by all creamery supply 

 firms for determining the amount of water in butter — the Gray's moisture 

 test, the Irish test and the butter test bottle. None of these pieces of 

 apparatus is found to give absolutely accurate results in the hands of 

 buttermakers generally, but they do give results sufficiently accurate so 

 that the buttermaker can avoid loss in the way of small overrun on the 

 one hand and penalties for manufacture of butter adulterated with water 

 on the other. 



The creamery manager should furnish the buttermaker with proper 

 apparatus for testing his butter, and should then insist, on pain of 

 discharge, that every churning of butter be tested for water content 

 before it leaves the factory. The business of the average creamery in 

 this State amounts to about $10 or $12 a day, or $30,000 or $40,000 a 

 year. A loss of even one per cent makes a considerable sum of money. 

 The detection of a single shipment of butter containing too much moisture 

 may cost the creamery a very large sum of money, and to neglect pre- 

 cautions against possibilities of this kind amounts to a betrayal of the 

 interests of the patrons of the creamery. 



COAL TAR COLORS IN BUTTER. 



For fifteen or twenty years coal tar colors have been used to a very 

 large extent in the manufacture of butter. There has always been more 

 or less of a prejudice existing in the minds of a good many people against 

 the use of these colors in any food product. There has never been a 

 prosecution for sale of butter containing one of these products in any 

 state so far as known to this department, and there is not a particle of 

 evidence that butter so colored ever did injure the consumer or that it 

 could injure him. However, it is perfectly well known that certain coal 

 tar colors used in other food products were of a slightly poisonous nature, 

 and one or two of the States, for the sake of consistency, have by law 

 prohibited the use of coal tar colors in every food product. Under au- 

 thority of the national food law the Board of Food and Drug Inspection 

 on July 13, 1907, in Food Inspection Decision 76, says: "The use in food 

 for any purpose of any mineral dye or any coal tar dye, except those 

 coal tar dyes hereinafter listed, will be grounds for prosecution. Pending 

 further investigations now under way and the announcement thereof, the 



