DISTRIBUTION OF MILK 71 



a nearby farmer makes it a business to peddle milk to 

 some of the residents of the town. But in our cities there 

 must be for most consumers some sort of a middleman. 

 There are two main methods of distributing milk, 

 direct and indirect. In the direct method the producer 

 himself or his hired employee delivers the milk to the con- 

 sumer, or the consumer himself gets it from the producer 

 as described in the preceding paragraph. In the indirect 

 method the producer sells the milk in bulk or even oc- 

 casionally bottled to a middleman, who puts it through 

 the various necessary processes on its way to the consumer. 

 It is relatively seldom that a second or a third middleman 

 enters, though often this does occur in the larger cities. 

 For example, for many years a firm in Chicago did a large 

 business in placing farmers' milk and in making collec- 

 tions therefor. More recently many producers' associa- 

 tions have undertaken this function in various cities, thus 

 assuring their members of a more certain market and at 

 the same time making substantial gains through better 

 selling and closer collections. In every city there is more 

 or less dealing in milk between dealers, a so-called hori- 

 zontal movement, which is only a method of equalizing 

 supplies so that dealers temporarily short can get a supply 

 from dealers temporarily long on milk. In the main, how- 

 ever, there is only one middleman. The larger any given 

 city grows, the greater comes to be the distance between 

 the consumer and the producer, and the more necessary 

 does it become that there be an efficient middleman to 

 take the milk of producers, bring it to the city, and dis- 

 tribute it. Only a small fraction of the producers about 

 many of our large cities could to-day deliver their own 

 milk to the consumer, and most of those could do so only 

 at a much greater expense than it is now being done. 



