74 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION 



er, the can, because they are awkward to wash and hard to dry. 

 In a small city like this the bottling" devices which the various 

 small dealers use is responsible for the large amount of germ 

 life that gets into the milk. 



While those things have very little real significance, still 

 people object to sour milk. That buttermilk which you pay a 

 good price for has about two hundred million germs per cubic 

 centimeter. It is really a vegetable soup instead of a milk, and 

 it's fine. Now, if you get one-half that number of germs in 

 your regular milk supply, it is awful and you change milkmen 

 right away. You see how beautifully inconsistent we are. If 

 your wife should serve bread with blue mould, there would be 

 a family jar, and yet you go down and pay 80 cents a pound for 

 Roquefort cheese ripened with that same mould. And so these 

 germs we fuss about in our city supply of milk are in the main 

 the same thing we pay for in buttermilk, they shorten the com- 

 mercial life of the milk and for this reason are very objection- 

 able in the city milk business. 



I have already kept you too long and you want to see those 

 pictures of the Dairy Train, but I cannot .stop without saying 

 just one word about the question of grading milk. 



If one of you intelligent-looking people should go over to 

 a store down here and ask for a yard of cloth, they would won- 

 der when you got out of Kankakee — they have two hundred 

 kinds of cloth in that store. But you ask a milk dealer for a 

 bottle of milk. There is almost as large a difference in the qual- 

 ity of milk as there is in cloth. We buy the one intelligently, 

 the other we buy simply as "milk." Take it over in the fruit 

 business, if as a dealer you got the same price for cider apples 

 as for the firsts, nobody would want to go into the business. 

 Now, if we could get the milk business organized in the right 

 way that we can have recognized differences in the grades oi 

 milk, so that if a man wants firsts he can get it and not have 

 seconds or cider apples pawned off on him, and then the fellow 

 who is making first-class milk would get a price for his milk 

 in conformity with its grade. 



Our present market conditions call for about three grades 

 of milk. 



