MILKING MACHINES.* 
PART I, EFFECT UPON QUALITY OF MILK. 

BY W. A. STOCKING, JR., AND C. J. MASON. 
INTRODUCTION. 
The labor connected with the routine work of milking is one 
of the most exacting operations on the ordinary dairy farm. 
The operation must be performed regularly twice each day 
since it will not do to have the periods between milkings ma- 
terially different in length. The cows must be milked week- 
days and Sundays and the milking must be done three hun- 
dred sixty-five days in the year. The labor cost of milking 
is considerable, much more than the ordinary dairyman 
realizes if he has not carefully figured up the actual cost in 
time required to milk a cow for a year. In order to get the 
best results, each cow should be milked regularly by the same 
milker. She should be treated kindly and milked out as clean 
as possible. With the present difficulty of securing competent 
farm help, it is frequently difficult and in many cases im- 
possible, to secure satisfactory milkers. In many cases it is 
necessary to keep more help than would otherwise be needed 
in order to have men available at milking time. Frequently 
the numberof cows which a dairyman can keep is limited by 
the number of milkers which he is able to obtain. Not in- 
frequently a dairyman finds himself with insufficient help for 
milking his herd, and occasionally a man gives up the dairy 
business simply because of the impossibility of getting satis- 
factory help at prices warranted.by the returns from the busi- 
ness. 
Manual labor is one of the most expensive things which the 
farmer has to buy, and wherever possible, he makes use of ma- 
chinery in doing his work. In this way he lessens the number 
of men he has to employ. During the past few years many 
of the common farm operations have been made easier and 
very much cheaper because of the improved machinery which | 
has been developed for agricultural purposes. If the milking 
‘ could also be done by machinery, the work would be made very 
much easier and the cost of the operation might be very ma- 
*The machine used in all the experiments discussed in this bulletin 
was the Burrell-Lawrence-Kennedy milking machine. 
