90 BOARD OF AGKICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



tion of the animals ; the health and general cleanliness of 

 the milkers ; the condition of the utensils, with power to 

 condemn those from which the tin had rusted or worn off; 

 the methods of handlino- and storino- the milk after it is 

 drawn ; and the feed of the animals. The class of men se- 

 lected for this work should be such that they can be given 

 almost absolute authority. From a careful study of the 

 clean-milk problem, I am thoroughly convinced that no sys- 

 tem of inspection of the milk itself will ever bring about the 

 conditions which we desire, but that a complete and thor- 

 ough inspection on the premises where the milk is produced 

 is the ideal toward which we should work. Some will object 

 to the expense of this ; but if the danger in consuming is 

 only half as great as our physicians believe and as carefully 

 prepared statistics seem to indicate, much more expense than 

 this inspection would entail is justified. 



Some have thought that pasteurization was going to solve 

 all the difficulties regarding our milk suppl}^ ; l>ut pasteuriza- 

 tion, unless more thorough and complete than is usually 

 given in a commercial way, kills only the lactic acid germs 

 which nature placed in the milk as a protection, while the 

 pathological germs, which are really the menace to health, 

 are left in an alkaline instead of an acid medium, all ready 

 to multiply when other conditions are favorable. The dan- 

 ger of using pasteurized milk may be far greater than using 

 it when unpasteurized. The fact that this idea of pas- 

 teurization has been exploited so greatly at our dairy and 

 other conventions has led many farmers to believe that it was 

 a cure for all evils, and that there was no necessity of their 

 taking better care of their milk at home, since running it 

 through the pasteurizer would eradicate the results of all the 

 sins that they committed. 



In our large manufacturing establishments methods and 

 appliances are often changed almost completely, at great ex- 

 pense, to reduce the cost of production or to improve the 

 product. In clean-milk production we have two prime fac- 

 tors that by careful study we may reduce : one is the cost of 

 production, and the other is the bacteriological count. In a 

 stable recently visited, taking down the silos and erecting 



