HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT 21 



becoming increasingly felt as a dominating factor in the con- 

 tinuance of successful and profitable crop production. Here 

 again the farm separator has come to the rescue. It has enabled 

 the farmer who keeps but a few cows, and who is located in 

 territory with too sparse a cow population, to justify the estab- 

 lishment and operation of local creameries, to find a ready 

 market for his cream by shipping to a distant creamery. And 

 it has thereby produced a vast development of the dairy 

 industry, and a large increase in the annual butter production 

 in the great grain-raising states of the Middle West. 



It is the hand separator also that made possible the estab- 

 lishment and operation of the large centralized creameries, which 

 now secure their cream almost entirely from milk separated on 

 the farms and which gather this cream either by means of 

 route wagons, or by the establishment of cream stations to 

 which the farmer himself hauls the cream, or by having it 

 shipped to the creamery by the farmer direct. The rapid 

 development of the creamery business in this country during 

 the last twenty-five years may well be attributed in a large 

 measure to the introduction of the farm separator. 



Influence of the Babcock Test. Aside from the invention 

 of the centrifugal separator the invention and perfection of 

 methods for the rapid and accurate determination of butterfat 

 in milk and cream played a most important role in the develop- 

 ment of the butter industry within the last quarter of a 

 century. 



With the beginning of the factory system of buttermaking 

 the urgent need of a method to determine the per cent of fat 

 in milk and cream became more and more apparent, in order 

 to enable the factory to pay the farmer on the basis of the 

 butterfat value of his milk or cream. While the chemist was 

 able to accurately estimate the butterfat by the ether fat 

 extraction method, this means was too difficult of operation 

 and too slow of results for use in the creamery. The creamo- 

 meter or cream gauge, in which the layer of cream rising on 

 top of the milk was measured, the churn test, in which samples 

 of cream from the individual farmers were churned in order to 



