44 THE MARKETING OF WHOLE MILK 



f. o. b. the city railway station; or again, a price may be 

 quoted at the farm gate. Even here, however, one cannot 

 be sure as to the prices received by the farmer, for the lat- 

 ter may have to pay all or a part of the cost of hauling. 

 In many sections prices quoted are for milk delivered, 

 at the country bottling plant. Many companies make 

 quotations at several different stages to accommodate 

 farmers variously located. For example, it is not at all 

 uncommon to find a company buying from farmers who 

 deliver their own milk at the city plant door and at the 

 same time gathering milk from the farms of others, and 

 paying them different prices, while in another part of 

 its milk territory the same company may be operating a 

 country bottling plant and basing its payments on milk 

 delivered at that place. 



The Babcock test, since its introduction, has been 

 widely adopted as one of the factors in the basic price. 

 Perhaps the most usual method is to pay for milk of a 

 given richness in fat, say 4 per cent, at so much per hun- 

 dredweight. Then for each one-tenth of one per cent of 

 butterfat above the basic test, a certain number of cents 

 are added and the same number of cents deducted for milk 

 testing less than this basic test. In many instances this 

 differential has been so low as to be prejudicial to men with 

 cows producing milk rich in fat. It would seem that this 

 differential should be quite close to the market price of 

 butterfat. 1 



' For a further discussion of this point see Appendix B. 



