THE MILK CONTRACTOR 239 



it receives final preparation for the market or whether the milk is made 

 ready for city delivery. Country plants may be simply receiving stations 

 where the milk is weighed, cooled, recanned and loaded into cars or they 

 may be very completely equipped stations where the milk -is weighed and 

 clarified, after which part is separated to get the cream requisite for city 

 consumption and for use in standardizing the rest. After standardiza- 

 tion, the milk is canned without pasteurization or after having gone 

 through this process is canned or bottled and then cooled to between 

 40 to 50F., finally being loaded onto the cars. The skim-milk is utilized 

 in various ways; it may be sold back to the farmers for feeding to stock 

 in which case it should always be pasteurized to prevent the dissemina- 

 tion of tuberculosis and other diseases among the animals or the casein 

 may be precipitated with dilute acids and sold to concerns that manu- 

 facture it into size and other products. In some country milk plants by 

 the use of bacterial cultures milk beverages such as buttermilk, koumyss 

 and others are made from the skim-milk. 



Cream. Cream is sent to the city market with varying butterfat 

 content under trade names such as No. 9, No. 17, single, double, coffee, 

 light creams, etc., that have no exact meaning but that convey to the 

 customer the idea that the creams are of different richness. Thus one 

 dealer's light cream may contain 12 per cent, butterfat, another's 15 

 per cent, and still another 17 per cent., their double creams will be much 

 richer but improbably twice as rich and they will differ in like manner 

 from one another in butterfat content. The separator makes it easy 

 to control the percentage of butterfat in cream for it is so constructed 

 that by adjusting the cream screw the milk may be closely or lightly 

 skimmed. Also from a heavy cream, one of any desired lower butterfat 

 content can be made up by adding either whole or skim-milk in proper 

 proportion. Of late years there has been marked increase in the demand 

 for cream, not only for manufacture into ice cream and other dairy 

 products, but for preparing fancy dishes in hotels and for family use so 

 that the sale of sweet cream has become an important part of the city 

 milk business. In some markets the price of cream actually determines 

 the price of milk. Sometimes country milk plants are wholly devoted 

 to the preparation and shipping of sweet cream. In such plants the 

 milk is separated, the cream pasteurized, cooled, canned and loaded into 

 cars while the skim-milk is worked up separately. 



The Cream Separator. The separator is to be found on many dairy 

 farms and in most milk plants, in fact it is all but indispensable to every- 

 one who sells milk and cream. By the separator, milk can be more 

 rapidly and efficiently skimmed than by gravity; the richness of the 

 cream can be controlled and the separation can be done at any time so 

 that waiting for the cream to rise is unnecessary. The separator works 

 on the centrifugal principle. The whole milk enters a revolving bowl 



