How to Get Tainted Milk.

Wairarapa Standard, Volume XVIII, Issue 1735, 18 September 1885, Page 3

How to Get Tainted Milk.

A HINT TO DAIRY FARMERS

It is not long ago that an account appeared in the National Live Stock Journal, of milk spoiled by being saturated with die odor of onions, from tethering a cow to the leeward of an onion patch. In the experience of the writer, twelve cows, in passing to and from their pasture, were subjected to the scent of a dead calf lying twenty rods from the lane through which they travelled. Exposure to the tainted sir did not exceed one minute at eaok passage, yet they inhaled infection enough to make their mdk otiensive, and to nearly spoil, for cheese making, the milk of 85 cows with which their milk was mixed. When the cause was discovered, the burial of the calf terminated the effect. In four different instances the writer has known of cheese being materially injured in cheese factories from the cows of one of the dairies inhaling air scented from dead calves lying round the barn in a state of decay. The annual reports of the dairy associations have often contained similar cases. Foul air is one of the readiest modes of contaminating milk. It will injure milk sooner than bad food. What is taken into the stomach may bo, and often is, to a large extent neutralised by digestion, but infection taken into the lungs is at once, but without change, forced into circulation. There is no surer way of befouling milk than by forcing cows to breathe the confined air of their stables, saturated with the fumes of their perspiration and excrement. The consequence of breathing such odours is so plain and certain that it seems strange i li.it it should lie permitted to the extent it is The assumption so commonly made that the milk absorbs the scent after it ia drawn, is doubtless one of the prominent causes. It is time that delusion was tli-f.tdh'd and that dairymen should appreciate the fact that if they are to have pure smelling and pure-flavoured milk when their cows are in the barn, tii 'V must contrive to keep the odours of lt.e stable from the nostrils of their cows, and ,;ivo them pure air to breathe. Hurrying the milk out of the barn may be a eood tli'M;.; to do, but it will not reiimve the common cause and frequent ceeurience of stable odours in milk.