THE DAIRY. 287 



tomers to take his product through the year, or he will have 

 to submit to the chances of the general market, which are 

 very unsatisfactory. If a man undertakes to dispose of his 

 butler product, as it has been done for years, by delivering 

 a few pounds here and there to the consumer, the cost 

 per pound of this method of disposition of the product is a 

 great deal more than is generally recognized. It is rarely 

 known how much it costs to put «i pound of butter into the 

 hands of a consumer who lives one, two or five miles dis- 

 tant, every week or every fortnight. Hence, I do not believe 

 there is any profit in that way of realizing, with butter at 

 ordinary prices ; and if a man simply ships his butter from 

 his farm to a large market, taking his chances, it is per- 

 haps even less satisfactory. If we go into the markets, and 

 examine back for eight or ten years, we find a very general 

 preference for what is known as " creamery butter" among' 

 large sellers in the trade, and among large buyers and con- 

 sumers. What is meant in the market by "creamery but- 

 ter," is not butter made in any particular way, with any 

 special appliances, but it means butter made at a factory 

 from the milk or cream which comes from two or more 

 farms. Mixed milk or mixed cream from a number of farms 

 is the only thing that makes what is recognized in the mar- 

 ket as creamery butter, as distinguished from dairy butter, 

 which means the product of a single herd on a single farm, 

 sent directly from that farm to the market. 



Creamery butter for ten years has ranged from one to 

 seven cents a pound more in its wholesale selling price than 

 dairy butter, at difierent seasons of the year. There has 

 been no one year for ten years that the average price of dairy 

 butter at its best has come within a cent of the average price of 

 creamery butter, and for the greater part of every year the 

 difierence has i)een nearer seven cents than one. The averasre 

 difierence for ten years upon the weekly quotations (I state 

 this from memory, but from a table that I compiled myself 

 from the most careful market reports which I could find and 

 which I consider reliable, and it has borne the test of a good 

 many careful criticisms), — the difference for the last ten 

 years, by weekly averages during the year, between creamery 

 butter and dairy butter, both in Boston and in New York, has 



