368 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



use of preservatives has been discovered. Newspaper accounts of ex- 

 tensive adulterations of milk are not warranted by any known facts. 



The inspection carried on by this department does not extend to the 

 farms or the cows that produce the milk sold in these cities, and hence 

 does not give any assurance that the milk sold is produced from healthy 

 animals nor that it is handled in a cleanly manner up to the time that it 

 appears for sale to the consumer. Neither the funds nor the authority 

 given this department enable us to carry on any such inspection. 



CENTRALIZATION OF CREAMERIES. 



It is impossible to give any inclusive and exclusive definition of the 

 centralized creamery in this State for the reason that the State possesses 

 all the varieties of creameries that exist anywhere. There are in the 

 State ninety plants that answer aflBrmatively to the question, "Do you 

 receive any cream by rail?" It is believed that about half this number 

 actually receive one-fourth or more of their butterfat by rail. Twenty- 

 one of the largest centralizing plants report that they make 24,357,637 

 pounds of butter. If we include another score of the smaller centralizing 

 plants, they doubtless make one-third of the creamery butter manufactured 

 in this State. Attention is called to the fact that the numbers given in 

 the tables in this report show only the place of manufacture of the butter 

 and not the place where the cows are kept or the butterfat actually 

 produced. 



Another interesting fact shown by a study of the individual creamery 

 reports is that in the smaller local creameries each patron produces about 

 a thousand pounds of butter, while the centralized creameries appear to 

 make from five hundred to seven hundred pounds of butter per patron 

 which they report. The question is asked all creameries, "How many 

 patrons did you have on July 1, 1907?" The patronage of the creamery 

 with fifteen hundred to three thousand patrons is naturally fluctuating, 

 but the number on the books any one day ought to represent about the 

 average number for the year. It is hardly possible that the centralizing 

 creameries particularly attract the small producer, and just why their 

 patrons should produce only half or three-fourths as much as the patrons 

 of the local' creameries is a question that this department is unable to 

 answer. 



This department is bound to accept as correct the statements made by 

 creamery managers as to the number of patrons and the number of 

 pounds of butter made, for the reason that the necessary records of the 

 creamery, are at hand. The number of pounds of butter made by the 21 

 creameries included in the above paragraph divided by the number of 

 the patrons they reported as being on their books July 1st gives 590 

 pounds as the average amount of butter produced by each patron. The 

 average for the State is more than a thousand pounds per patron as 

 shown by Table 2 of this report. This low average per patron and the 

 consequent low apparent production per cow for the State, which appears 

 from an inspection of the same table, is occasioned by the extremely low 

 figures given by the central plants, which report about one-third of the 

 butter of the State, but which report one-half the number of patrons and 

 about one-half the cows embraced in the figure given in Table 2. The 



