With Milk and Sugar Blest 201 



goes to the cheese factories which turn out some eighteen vari- 

 eties of cheeses, under four hundred different names. Cheeses, 

 like Roquefort, which are made of ewes' milk in Europe, are 

 made of cows' milk in this country. 



Our consumption of cheese is going up every year, as we 

 make better and still better cheeses. Strangely enough, as our 

 appetites for cheese grows, our taste for butter declines. We 

 are eating less butter and drinking more milk and eating more 

 cheese year by year. 



It is not the cow's feed, but her breed, which determines 

 the richness of her milk. The Jersey leads the list in the pro- 

 portion of butter-fat and protein per pound of milk. The 

 Guernsey comes second. The black and white Holstein- 

 Friesian cattle give the greatest quantity of milk of any of 

 the breeds, but it is the lowest in fat and protein. No matter 

 how richly you feed a Holstein, you cannot increase the pro- 

 portion of fat in the milk. You get more milk, and through 

 a longer period; but the quality remains the same. 



Every year our cows eat about half as much corn as we feed 

 to our hogs. This is not calculable in bushels because most of 

 it goes into ensilage, which means that stalks, leaves and ears 

 are chopped and packed into the silos for fodder. The round 

 towers beside the dairy barns are the first line of defense of 

 the nation's health. In the well-managed dairy herds, the daily 

 ration per cow is thirty pounds of silage (which means corn) 

 and ten pounds of clover or alfalfa hay. Cows which are fed 

 on this diet, with some cereal grain or prepared gluten feed 

 (also made from corn) frequently give forty-five pounds of 

 milk per day. 



The chief ingredient in milk is water. One hundred pounds 

 of cows' milk contain eighty-seven pounds of water. The re- 

 maining thirteen pounds are divided thus: 



4 Ibs. butter-fat 



3^ Ibs. protein (casein and albumin) 



5 Ibs. milk sugar 



y^ Ib. mineral (ash) 



