208 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION 



order to keep up a steady, constant flow of milk. However, 

 this point is not so important for dairymen who seperate the 

 milk, sell cream, and use the skim milk for feeding pur- 

 poses. 



MILKING 



Regularity 



Of all dairy operations, milking on most farms takes 

 the most time and to many persons is the most irksome. It 

 has commonly been assumed that cows should not only be 

 milked regularly but that they should also be milked each 

 time by the same man. Doubtless this has had much to do 

 with many persons' distaste for dairy work. 



Experiments at the Bureau of Dairying experimental 

 farm at Beltsville, Md., show that with cows that are aver- 

 age to good, milking may take place at irregular hours 

 without any marked effect upon production. Whether very 

 high producers would show similar results has not been 

 determined. It was also found that when irregular milking 

 was accompanied by irregular feeding the production was 

 lessened about 5 per cent. Apparently cows are more 

 sensitive to changies in the feeding routine than to variation 

 in the hours of milking. The conclusion is not to be drawn 

 from these experiments that regularity in doing the dairy 

 work is a matter of little importance, but rather that cows 

 can occasionally be milked earlier or later than usual if 

 there is something else to which the dairyman desires to 

 give his time. 



Though it is generally believed that a cow will produce 

 more when milked always by the same person, the practice 

 in many large dairies where there are several milkers is to 

 milk the cows as they come, rather than to reserve certain 

 cows for each man. At the Beltsville station, 12 cows were 

 divided into three groups of four cows each, and each group 

 was milked regularly by the same man for 40 days. The 

 12 cows were then milked by the same three men in such a 

 way that no cow was milked twice in succession by the same 

 man. After 40 days the cows were changed to regular milk- 

 ing again for 40 days. The results show an increase of about 



