THE DAIRY INDUSTRY 25 



butter at a minimum expense have grown up. These plants have been 

 departmentalized, in order to render a maximum service to producer 

 and to consumer alike. This means that in the creamery business, 

 not only methods of procuring the raw material, methods of handling 

 and manufacturing, and great improvements in machinery have been 

 developed, but also that the business end of this great enterprise has 

 grown from a haphazard practise to a highly specialized system equal 

 to any other industry of today. 



As in the milk industry, science has contributed its share to 

 modern creamery practise. Many of our large plants today have well 

 equipped laboratories with a scientific staff whose duty it is to 

 standardize and control plant methods, and conduct research into 

 problems bearing on the various phases of the industry. Some of the 

 important developments growing out of such studies are : methods 

 for determining acidity of cream ; control of acidity of cream ; methods 

 of determining moisture and salt and fat content, and means of con- 

 trolling them in the finished product ; and rapid bacteriological tests 

 indicating the efficiency of sanitary measures and pasteurization. It 

 may also be of interest to state that one of our large machinery or- 

 ganizations characterizes itself as an organization of "dairy engineers," 

 and that much of their effort has been spent in making short cuts of 

 chemical and bacteriological methods which would reduce these op- 

 erations to a basis of every-day plant practise. 



All of this does not mean that our creamery problems are all 

 solved ; on the contrary, this new development comes laden with prob- 

 lems of both a business and a scientific character. 



COLD STORAGE FACILITIES 



Parallel with the development within the industry has been the 

 development of cold-storage facilities, a system little understood by the 

 consuming public. Often the storage house is described as a recep- 

 tacle for hoarding food and its operator as a parasite living off the 

 public; but when we realize that one-half of the volume of butter 

 produced is produced in three to four months, we cannot fail to rec- 

 ognize that the storing of a perishable product like butter is quite as 

 desirable as the canning of peaches in the time of plenty for the winter 

 supply. In the absence of cold storage, a part of our supply in the 

 spring would be almost valueless, and in winter our prices would be 

 prohibitive. So the storage house, properly conducted, performs the 

 double function of storing and financing our butter surplus. 



