MILK SELLING UTENSILS

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1715, 11 January 1905, Page 68

MILK SELLING UTENSILS

For many years past dairy schools have been teaching pupils how to make butter and cheese and otherwise to handle the milk and cream ; while milk selling—which really is now one of the most important departments of dairying—has been neglected as far as teaching and demonstration is required. The writer would suggest that, some of these schools should inaugurate a short course of instruction in matters -which pertain to a milk-selling dairy. There is, for instance, the -washing of the utensils, the sterilising of the same by steam, the stoking and tending to a steam boiler, the selection of the proper utensils, the refrigerating of the milk, and so on, with a lot of other subjects. In view of our modern knowledge of the bacteriology of milk, and the proper treatment of the product to keep it sweet and good, about four out of five dairy folks do not know how to wash a milk pail properly, though they may have been at it all their lives. Nowadays when simple washing and scrubbing is not enough, and sterilisation by steam or boiling is necessary, some training is needful, and a six or ten days’ course at a dairy school in this particular work would be an exceedingly good thing to try. xhe whole of each day would not, of course, be taken up at such work, and therefore there would be time to give some training in, say the testing of milk, the equalising of the quality of the milk over a lot of milk vessels or “churns,” the keeping of a byre and the cows therein clean, and so on. Anyhow, something might be done in this direction if the managers of some of the schools hunted up a class of pupils and made out a course of training as above outlined.