ILLINOIS DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



35 



Now in milking, the cows are groomed a half hour before they are 

 milked. That leaves time for the dust to settle. Then the milkers are 

 required to go and cleanse their hands thoroughly and put on their 

 white suits. We milk into a pail which has a strainer on top consisting 

 of two layers of gauze and one layer of absorbent cotton, and we put 

 all of the milk through that. Just in advance of the milkers is a man 

 who goes around and cleanses the udders with a pail of water and a 

 sponge. Here is a point I want to mention that is interesting to me. 

 In my early practice, I had each milker go over his row of cows before 

 ke commenced to milk. The work was small, and I had only put in a 

 portion of the herd into this sanitary stable, or, rather, into the certified 

 milk work as we needed them. I found every time a cow went into that 

 stable there was a shrinkage in her milk. I did not know what had 

 happened. Finally a mother gave me the idea. That manipulation of 

 the udder stimulated the secretion of milk, and to get the best results 

 you must work with nature and follow up that stimulation of the secre- 

 tions which had been caused by the manipulation of the udder. If you 

 lost the benefit of that manipulation and the cow settled back, you had to 

 pay for it in a small flow of milk. I changed then and adopted a plan of 

 having one man cleanse the udders for ten milkers. One man can do 

 that. Just go around and keep just ahead of the ten milkers. It keeps 

 him busy all right to do that, but that shrinkage of milk all ceases then. 

 After the milk is drawn it is taken out of the stable and emptied in a 

 can, and as soon as the can is filled it is taken to the milk house, 

 and there the milk is put through a centrifugal separator. That is to 

 standardize the milk. This milk is used for infants' food and the doctors 

 wanted to modify this milk; they needed to know what the standard of 

 the milk was, so I adopted the standard of 4 per cent fat with the Bab- 

 cock test. By using this centrifugal separator, if the milk is above 4 

 per cent we can cut out a little cream. It was not up to this standard 

 for the first three or four years, and we had to catch up and raise our 

 standard. It used to run 3.6 and 3.7, along in there. I have been 

 weeding out more cows, not particularly with the idea of raising the 

 standard, but weeding out the unprofitable cows and at the same time I 

 have raised the standard of the milk until the milk of my whole dairy 



