“WHAT IS YOUR FORTUNE?”

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 60, 2 June 1927, Page 8

“WHAT IS YOUR FORTUNE?”

Science Disapproves of the Dairymaid’s Ways

FACTORY MANAGERS CONFER

T ISTENING-IN on the factory u managers’ conference at Hamilton is a profitable engagement. Unfortunately the proceedings are not broadcast in the technical sense. Were they, it would be to the advantage of radio men. The factory men discuss a wide range of subjects associated with important products. Butter and cheese are of compelling interest to New Zealanders. One reason is because they are staple foods, and the other because they are exports of almost incalculable economic value.

Whereas butter and cheese were of old the products of primitive systems of manufacture, to-day their creation is surrounded by a maze of scientific data, and the ancient haphazard calculations are rigidly abjured. Thus the dairy industry becomes a science built on a matter-of-fact foundation, and to the factory manager the commonplace and the abstruse are one. Science in Dairying Yesterday Professor W. Riddett, lecturer on agriculture at the Auckland University College, told how science has been applied to the ancient industries which the assembled fac-

tory managers now conduct under elaborately refined conditions. It began with the thermometer and separator. Before that cheese and butter were produced under the conditions that had ruled for hundreds of years. The dairymaid was the butter maker, and she was guided by her senses of smell and taste, and a certain modicum of experience. Thus were foodstuffs turned out. From the presence of such conditions it was inevitable that butter and cheese should be more highly flavoured than is thought desirable to-day. The thermometer came along in 1860, setting in motion processes of refinement that are yet by no means ended.

Followed the separator, perhaps the greatest boon of all. The inventor was a German civil engineer, who had long been experimenting on the basis of known principles of physics, whereby the separation of liquids of different specific gravities—such as milk and cream—was deemed to be possible. Pasteurisation Appears Introduced in 1877, the separator was enormously improved by subsequent investigators. It paved the way for another important development, the pasteurisation of cream. Hitherto it had been possible only approximately to calculate the quality of cream to be converted into butter. Little was known of the true nature of the bacteria that created changes in milk, but Pasteur’s experiments in the fermentation of wines and beers —a misdirected effort, according to many—showed Danish investigators the way to knowledge of the organisms attacking milk, and about 1890 the heating of cream to 160 degrees was introduced in Denmark. Still another epochal innovation was to come—the Babcock tester. It removed the difficulties of judging the fat content in milk, and allowed the farmer, as well as the manufacturer, to judge the quality of his supply. Thus was laid the foundation of the herd-testing systems now doing so much to raise the output of New Zealand dairy herds. Further modifications and changes in manufacturing principles were to come, and the introduction of the ocidometer was another advance. Selling Overseas Later the use of “starters,” which flavoured the product, was banned in New Zealand. This was a step toward the capture of the overseas market, as flavoured butter was liable to be “fishy” when it arrived in England. The old school, however, does not quite approve of the tasteless butter of to-day. “It is just like grease,” said one diehard at the show. “They pasteurise it, sterilise it, and neutralise it, and that is all that can he left.”