MILK AND CREAM

Waikato Independent, Volume XXXVI, Issue 3422, 20 February 1936, Page 7

MILK AND CREAM

IMPROVING THE QUALITY Great study and expenditure of money has been involved in the perfection of apparatus and machinery to improve the quality of inferior milk and cream, indeed all throughout the campaign to improve the quality of butter and cheese exported from New Zealand principal attention has been directed to overcoming defects in the raw materials rather than preventing them. Right throughout the dairy industry it has been a case of cure instead of prevention. Not only in the quality of milk and cream, but in the disease of dairy cattle and pigs. If all the energy that has been put into studying and treating the cure of dairy cattle disease had been concentrated on preventing disease by consistent propaganda in favour of breeding from animals of sound constitution and then feeding these adequately with easily digested food grown in soil completely fertilised, the farmers of the country would be very much better off and the industry would be in a much sounder position. And cure instead of prevention is still the policy of those instructing the farmer. And much the same thing applies to milk and cream quality. The best of our farmers, the majority of them, produce milk and cream that does not want doctoring to make them suitable for the making of the finest quality butter and cheese, but because the careless minority supply ,an inferior produce (and because cream is allowed to be plrchased from points as far removed from the making centre that quality is destroyed) the whole of the cream has to be doctored. Recently some factories have been installing special machinery to take the bad odour out of the milk, but while the machinery is very effective for the purpose for which it has been installed it has also had the undesirable effect of destroying the naturally good flavour of the milk and cream in tfje particular district. This is a particularly striking case of effecting reform at the wrong end.