ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 233 



salted for the foreign market. We cannot do that, because 

 our home consumption is too large a proportion of the produc- 

 tion, and you reall^^ might say that it is only in an emergency 

 that we export any butter at all. 



Now, regarding the amount of water in butter for export. 

 I do not think that we have had very much difficulty during 

 the last year regarding that. There have been a good many 

 lots of butter shipped from both the English district and from 

 Iowa and from Kansas in packages, and Mr. Sands, who has 

 done a good deal of that exporting, told me that his fine butter 

 trade had not mentioned the matter to him, and that he had 

 no complaint; at the same time, our butter does not grade up 

 at all with Danish butter; it simply goes alongside with the 

 Canadian and scarcely up to the Australian. The thing that 

 the foreign market wants, if they take our butter, is uni- 

 formity, more than anything else. I had a long talk with an 

 exporter who had spent six months in foreign countries build- 

 ing up a demand for his butter. He said he had no difficulty 

 selling American butter at a fair price by sample. He would 

 sell, for instance, one lot, and it would give satisfaction; then 

 send back into this country for a duplicate of that same order, 

 and it would come over there and it would be different. The 

 consequence was that the Englishmen are very much dissatis- 

 fied with it ; they told him that if they could not get a uniform 

 grade they didn't want it. 



There is another obstruction in the way of this country's 

 building up an export demand for butter, and that is in the 

 matter of ocean freights. We have not at present the re- 

 frigeration capacity for any large amount of butter. In the 

 summer time or in the time of our heaviest production, the 

 lines from New York cannot take care of more than seven 

 or eight thousand packages a week in their refrigerators. 

 They have refrigerator capacity, but it is taken up with dressed 

 meats and other articles, fruits, apples and even California 

 fruits have crowded butter out of the refrigerators, and they 

 are not increasing their capacity; will not do so without a guar- 

 anty. The dressed meat exporters guarantee zhf^ steamship 

 lines a certain amount every week, and that is the way they 

 get the capacity. Last summer the butter men of New York 

 got together and made a guarantee that they would export 



