CATTLE THE DAIRY. 833 



XI. 



THE DAIRY. 



THE annual butter product of the United States has been 

 estimated at about one thousand million pounds, and a com- 

 mittee appointed by the New York Butter and Cheese Ex- 

 change to investigate the matter, reported that the statistics 

 were incomplete and defective, and that from the best data at 

 their command they believed the annual product would reach 

 fourteen hundred million pounds. Probably in no other country 

 on the globe is the consumption of butter so great per capita 

 as with us. 



As co-operative or factory dairying will be treated under a 

 separate head, I shall confine myself at present to farm dairying. 

 Aside from providing for the wants of the family, under what 

 circumstances will it pay to run a butter dairy ? 



I answer : First, only when there is sufficient help in the 

 house to enable the work to be done at the right time and well 

 done. A woman can not have the care of a family of children, 

 do the cooking, mending, making, sweeping, and the thousand 

 things that devolve on a mother, and be a good dairymaid, or 

 if she is, it is more than one woman ought to do. Second, there 

 will be no profit in butter-making unless a superior article is 

 produced, and this can not be done without suitable apparatus 

 and conveniences, and no one should attempt it unless these are 

 provided. 



In other words, in running a butter dairy there will be 

 much hard work, which can not be postponed, as the cows must 

 be milked, the milk put away, skimmed, and churned, the butter 

 worked and prepared for market every day, and this must be 

 done in the freezing weather of winter, and the hot, sultry days 



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