MILK SUPPLY : DISCUSSION 223 



and at times sprayed with disinfectants; and it was also 

 very difficult to impress upon him the necessity of cleaning 

 the cows themselves. They would clean their horses; they 

 would brush them and use the comb on them to make them 

 fit for their work, but they never seemed to think there 

 was any necessity to clean the cows in the same way. Un- 

 doubtedly it would be very useful if they could thoroughly 

 imbue the farmers with the idea that it was quite, if not 

 more, important to keep their cows clean. Sometimes, 

 unfortunately, when a visit was paid to the farms in the 

 milking time, it was found that the people who were milking 

 the cows were doing so without having first washed their 

 hands and taken the ordinary precautions necessary to keep 

 dust and dirt away from the milk. That state of things was, 

 he was glad to say, better than it was ten or fifteen years 

 ago. The farmers and the men were gradually becoming 

 educated and he thought that when the Milk Bill passed 

 the Houses of Parliament many farmers in his district 

 would have been so far educated that they would be ripe 

 for it and they would not have much difficulty in getting 

 it enforced. There was in some parts of the country dis- 

 tricts almost as much difficulty in getting milk as there was 

 in some parts of the large towns. He remembered visiting 

 some cottages in the district in which he worked and he 

 asked the occupants from whom their milk was procured, 

 and they told him they could not get milk at all, that when 

 they used milk at all they had to use condensed milk, and 

 the reason was that it paid many of the farmers much better 

 to grow potatoes, cabbages, cauliflowers, and other vege- 

 tables for the markets in the large towns, than to keep cows 

 and produce milk. They found that many dairy farmers 

 had been hard hit, and they knew in what direction their 

 pecuniary interests lay they were not exactly philan- 

 thropists. They were out, like many other people, to make 

 money, and they were not going to produce milk at a loss 

 if they could produce anything else which would pay them 

 better. 



Dr. S. G. MOSTYN (Darlington) said that one thing which 

 he felt they needed in connection with the regulation of the 

 milk supply was a definite statement of certain facts. Over 

 and over again they heard accounts from the various 

 farmers' associations about the peculiar way in which the 

 standard of milk varied. He had had samples of milk taken 

 well below the standard in fat. As soon as the report came 

 from the analyst an appeal was made to the cow as recom- 

 mended by the Board of Agriculture, and the milk obtained 

 from the cow was excellent; and yet he had known 



