Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/255

Rh Dairy schools on a similar plan as the one just described have been in operation during the past year or two at the Agricultural Colleges of Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Iowa, and New York (Cornell). Other States will doubtless establish similar schools in the near future, as the demand for instruction in these branches is steadily increasing, and students are taxing to the utmost the capacity of the schools existing.

Only a small proportion of the milk produced in the United States is obtained on farms situated in the direct neighborhood of cities where the milk can be sold as such; in all other places it must be manufactured into butter or cheese. Where the population of a district is not sufficient to support a butter or cheese factory, the manufacture of dairy products, and primarily butter, must take place on the farm itself. Modern invention has greatly facilitated the work of butter-making on the farm; by the introduction of hand separators all apparatus for setting the milk, either in ice tanks or in a separate milk room, in metal or wooden vessels, may be done away with; the cream is obtained at once by the separator, and thus only one fifth of the quantity of material has to be taken care of, as the skim milk may be fed directly to calves or pigs. These hand separators are made in various sizes to suit the requirements of different herds. They are not very expensive, so that any farmer of moderate means can buy them. The manufacturers claim for them, and without exaggeration, that they will pay their cost each year over and above any other system, with a herd of ten or more cows, on account of the larger yield of butter obtained with them from the same quantity of milk. In other systems of creaming a much larger portion of the fat in the milk is left in the skim milk, which is thus lost for butter-making.

The modern churns, which are mostly barrel-shaped or of rectangular form, make churning mere play. The method of butter-making now generally adopted is about as follows: The cream is churned at about 56° to 62° Fahr., the temperature differing somewhat with the season and the ripeness of the cream. The butter will come after twenty to forty minutes' turning, sometimes more, sometimes less, according to acidity, temperature, and other conditions present. The buttermilk is then drawn off through a hole near the bottom of the churn, and the butter washed in the churn, placed on the butter worker to free it as completely as possible from buttermilk, and then salted (one ounce of salt to one pound of butter); again worked and packed in tubs, and is now ready for shipment. Our pictures show the making of creamery and of dairy butter.

In this country cheese is made almost entirely in factories; as many will know, the process employed in the making of our