138 CONFERENCE ON MILK PROBLEMS 



standard. Now, it may be that there is a vast difference between 

 a city of 15,000 and a city like New York, and that any results 

 obtained on that small scale can hardly be transplanted to a city 

 of this size, but still the fundamental things which will affect the 

 situation in one place may often be applied in another. Experi- 

 ments, of course, were not conducted solely for your benefit. Per- 

 haps it is unkind to put it that way, but the fact is that you are 

 thoroughly able to do things by yourselves, while in the State of 

 New York and surrounding states, a large number of the cities of 

 the second and third class are at present doing little or nothing to 

 improve their milk supplies. There needs, you will see, to be a 

 compact and workable method to protect the milk supplies in this 

 state and surrounding states. 



The principles that were applied in this experiment were these: 

 An effort was made, first, to find out what the facts were regarding 

 the quality of milk being supplied to the public, and then present- 

 ing these facts to the consumer, the consuming public, so that they 

 might buy their milk more intelligently. There is no reason why 

 they should not be able to buy their milk as intelligently as they 

 buy their cotton cloth, or any of the other commodities that they 

 use, which are offered to them in various grades. The Board was 

 supposed to find out the sanitary conditions under which the va- 

 rious milks which were offered to the public were produced, the 

 influences which they had been exposed to, and, in some tangible 

 way, to present it to the consuming public, so that they might deal 

 with the producers on the basis of the quality of the goods pro- 

 duced. 



The great difficulty in the situation of the milk supply of New 

 York City, and all other cities, practically, of the state, is the fact 

 that the poorest milk receives the same financial rewards, practi- 

 cally, as the best milk. 



As a result of our experience at Geneva, I feel sure that the 

 milk supply of New York City could be brought up to any desired 

 standard of excellence, provided it was paid for on the basis of the 

 actual quality of the goods produced. (Applause.) The first 

 thing is to find out the actual situation regarding the milk supply, 

 and to express that in some intelligible way. Scoring is an old 

 practice, and we adopted the score card as a means of expressing 

 the situation as found by the inspectors of the dairies furnishing 

 the milk to our city. We found that a third of it would class as 

 poor milk, the rest of it, perhaps, as medium, with a little streak 

 of good milk at the top. (Indicating on diagram.) That (indi- 

 cating) represents the milk which is filthy; that (indicating) rep- 

 resents milk which is fairly good but not tuberculin tested, and 



