24 



How TO Produce Clean Milk. [Apr., 



hands and cows' teats become more flexible, and wet-milking 

 with milk as the lubricant becomes unnecessary and is soon 

 recognised as a dirty habit. When a cow has sore teats, it is 

 permissible to use vaseline during milking, but in such cases 

 great care must be taken that the milk never touches the hands. 

 In severe cases the milk thus obtained should not be mixed with 

 that offered for sale. 



From personal experience the writer has found that the adop- 

 tion of dry milking, combined with careful cleaning, has resulted 

 in the skin of the teats becoming of a soft yet tough texture, 

 with a greater freedom from sores, and the whole operation of 

 milking has become much more easy and pleasant. 



Attention should also be paid to the cleanliness of the milking 

 stools, especially the upper parts of the legs. Where the hands 

 are allowed to become wet with milk, this part of the leg, unless 

 regularly washed, gradually acquires a layer of dried milk. This 

 accumulation is not merely an evidence of carelessness and dirty 

 habits; it is also a ready means of carrying infection from a 

 cow with a bad teat or quarter to another cow, because the leg 

 of the stool is the first thing touched on rising from a cow, and 

 the last thing touched on sitting down to milk again. A dirty 

 stool leg may easily nullify all washing of the hands between 

 the milking of individual cows. 



Milking Pails with small Openings. — The common type of 

 milking pail is widest at the mouth, so that it may be easy to 

 milk into, but this advantage has the corresponding disadvantage 

 that all the pieces of litter, hairs and dust which fall from the 

 udder cannot but drop into the milk. Numerous types of pails 

 have been designed to lessen this defect, and the use of the 

 best of them has been found to lessen considerably the amount 

 of dirt and germs gaining entrance to the milk. Some types 

 have the opening so reduced in size that milking becomes much 

 more a matter of good aim than usual, and such pails also require 

 more careful washing than ordinary pails. If properly washed 

 and sterilised, however, they are of great assistance in the pro- 

 duction of clean milk, particularly so where the cleaning of the 

 cows has not been very carefully done. When the udders and 

 adjacent parts are washed clean, there is not the same advantage 

 to be gained from the use of such pails. It is worthy of note 

 that those who have used pails of this ty])e find that the slightly 

 increased loss of milk at milking times from part of streams of 

 milk failing to enter the pail is balanced by the reduced loss 

 when a fractious cow or heifer upsets the pail. Because of the 



