THE DAIRY INDUSTRY 21 



bills last year totaled about one billion dollars. During the period 

 under discussion this growth represents an effort to keep pace with the 

 growing population in our consuming centers, rather than any marked 

 increase in our per capita consumption. 



Accompanying this enormous growth in the volume of business, 

 there has been a corresponding improvement in the handling of the 

 product. We have passed from the stage of so-called "dip milk" to 

 a highly specialized system, extending from the farm to the consumer, 

 under which a thoroly safe, pasteurized product is delivered to the 

 consumer's door in an original sterilized container. Thus the city 

 milk business has passed out of the hands of the street peddler into 

 the hands of large organizations who may justly be called "specialists" 

 in this branch of the dairy industry. These advances have been made 

 possible largely through the joint effort and cooperation of the pro- 

 ducer, the business man, the scientist, boards of health, and machinery 

 men. Over twenty years ago the scientist pointed out the relation 

 between public health problems and a city's milk supply, and today 

 our whole program of milk distribution is built around the one idea 

 that the consumer must have an adequate supply of healthful milk at a 

 reasonable price. The real milk man has been shaping his business 

 with this one idea in mind. His efforts are represented : First, by 

 consistent field work in the country looking toward an improved sup- 

 ply. Here he has been assisted materially by the scientist, who has 

 furnished not only the standards but also the means for measuring the 

 quality, so far as this can be done. Second, nothing that modern 

 skill or science could suggest has been left undone in the plant toward 

 the turning out of the very highest quality product. In fact, there 

 is no food today surrounded by so many precautions as is our modern 

 milk supply. Probably no greater single development for the handling 

 of milk has been accomplished than the invention of our modern equip- 

 ment for perfect pasteurization, a process almost universally recog- 

 nized as a necessity for a safe milk supply. Here we might justly 

 add that the machinery firms have spent millions of dollars in the de- 

 velopment of machines, all of which have been periodically junked and 

 replaced by something more efficient; until the operation of putting 

 the vast quantity of milk through a city plant today, from the re- 

 ceiving to the delivery door, represents almost none of what might 

 be called "hand labor." Another branch of this same industry, grow- 

 ing largely under the direction of the scientist, is the certified milk 

 industry, and while I do not wish to dwell on this phase of the subject, 

 it is worthy of comment that the first certified milk of which we have 



