18 DAIRYING 



1. The cream is from the milk of a stripper cow or from 

 cows whose milk flow is drying up. This difficulty may be over- 

 come by so arranging- the herd that fresh cow's milk or milk 

 trom cows early in their milking period are distributed through- 

 out the year and the cows do not all "dry up" at the same time. 

 The particular condition of the milk of stripper cows, that causes 

 long churnings may be somewhat overcome by adding cold water 

 to such milk and separating the cream from it by the water 

 dilution process. This will cause a somewhat excessive loss of 

 fat in the skim milk as has already been described in the lesson 

 on cream separation, but when butter is made from a small herd 

 of cows and the majority of them are strippers, it may be an 

 economy of time in churning to use the dilution method of 

 creaming the milk of such cows. The cream so obtained may be 

 mixed with that from other cows' milk and a satisfactory churn- 

 ing made. 



The cream is too thm. This is especially the conditior 

 of cream from deep setting of milk in cold water. Such cream 

 may not contain more than 15 per cent, fat, and this is very diffi- 

 cult to churn, especially in cold weather. Cream having a rich- 

 ness of about 30 per cent, fat gives satisfactory churning results 

 and if it is thinner than this an effort should be made to con- 

 centrate the cream either by taking more skim milk when skim- 

 ming or by allowing the cream to stand 12 hours or more and 

 then draw off the skim milk that may separate from it at the 

 bottom. 



3. The cream is too cold. Churning on the farm should not 

 be attempted until the cream has been brought to a temperature 

 of about 60 degrees F., and some check should be made on the 

 accuracy of the thermometer used. These sometimes vary from 

 2 to 10 degrees and unless one knows by comparing the ther- 

 mometer used with some other one that is accurate, the ther- 

 mometer may be the cause of a long churning. In taking tem- 

 perature observations the thermometer should be allowed to re- 

 main in the cream at least five minutes before reading it. 



4. The churn is too full. The cream should not fill the 

 churn more than one-half full, and one-fourth full is better when 

 churning begins; if an attempt is made to churn more than this 

 amount of cream the time of churning may be abnormally long. 



