FEED FLAVOURS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 9, Issue 84, 10 June 1946, Page 8

FEED FLAVOURS

MILK, CREAM AND BUTTER (By E. R. Marryatt) II Milk and cream more than any other foods, are very sensitive to odours and readily absorb any which may be in their vicinity. Milk is a secretion of the mammary glands which are intimately associated with the blood stream, and any odour present in the blood stream will also be present in the milk as it is secreted and drawn. Just as the eating of onions will cause a bad breath for some hours afterwards through the odour being absorbed into the blood stream from the stomach and then dissipated in the air exhaled by way of the lungs, so the eating of an odorous plant of farm and field by the milking cow, will, if the cow should be milked within the next few hours, result in the flavour being present in the milk. Cress Flavour These flavours appear to be carried mainly in the fat globules and so are more pronounced in cream than, in milk. The milder forms of them can be diffused to some extent by aeration, as for example, by frequent stirring in a clean atmosphere, but the worst .flavour, “Cress” flavour, like mustard gas to which it is related, is much more persistent and also is able to diffuse itself through much larger quantities of cream without an appreciable loss of intensity. Cress flavour in a can of cressy cream, if undetected on the factory stage because the cream is cold, does not become lost when the can is emptied into a vat containing several thousand gallons of clean cream, but instead, imparts its undesirable qualities to all that cream. This makes trouble for the butter-maker who only discovers the flavour too

late, in the pasteurised cream or in the butter. * Guilty Pastures The heat in a cup of tea often exposes a hidden flavour in the milk, particularly if this flavour be cress. A cream grader will if he has cause to suspect a cream of being cressy, heat a small quantity to check up on his opinion before mixing the suspected cream with clean cream. Other feed flavours, and amongst them the common flavour known as “Feedy” which is caused by pastures and particularly by clovery pastures, and more especially by the annual clovers, namely subterranean and suckling clovers during periods of rapid growth in the spring and autumn can, to a large ejctent, be vacreated out of the cream at the factory, but so far, cress flavour cannot be processed out of the cream. A mouthful or two of cress eaten by one cow may taint a can of cream, and this can may in turn taint a whole churning of butter resulting in a substantial financial loss to the factory through reduced grading at the butter stores. Consequently it is up to the farmer to prevent any cow from eating the plant which causes the trouble— Cress. Occurrence of Cress This ill-natured fellow is known throughout the world as Coronopus didymus but in New Zealand he masquerades in different districts under various aliases, namely: “Twin cress,” Land-cress,” “Hog-cress,” “Swine-cress,” “Wart-cress,” and “Scurvy, grass.” An annual with finely divided leaves on trailing stems, it has small, clustered,, white flowers, and a seed-pod divided into twin-like halves. When crushed, the leaves give the characteristic pungent cress odour not unlike mustard. The plant, occurs chiefly in weak and open swards where fertility is not high; around old unspread droppings; at the base of thistles; where winter poaching has taken place; where the turf has been destroyed as on old stack bottoms and in races and yards; where the land has been cropped; and in new pastures particularly if spring sown. The obvious way to prevent cows from eating it is to have none on the farm and this desirable -condition is achievable only by adopting practices

which do not favour its establishment. Controlled Grazing An example of such a practice is pasture management which increases the density and the vigour of the grasses and clovers of the pasture sward and which maintains a close and unbroken turf. Where cress is present in spite of all efforts to prevent it, the milking cows must be kept off the pastures containing it and these pastures should be grazed only by dry stock. Sometimes, however, because of lack of other suitable grazing, the farmer cannot afford not to graze the cressy pasture. Controlled grazing must then be adopted, not with any justifiable hope of avoiding the flavour altogether, but with a reasonable prospect of minimising it. The herd should be removed from a pasture containing cress at least four hours before the next milking, or better still should be given only a couple of hours on it and then only immediately after milking.