DRIED MILK.

Taranaki Daily News, 14 June 1919, Page 11

DRIED MILK.

TRADE POSSIBILITIES Among the increasing number of but-ter-factory side lines now receiving attention at many of the factories throughout Victoria one of tli© most promising is dried mills. In the process o£ manufacture the one that appears to be most favored forces the milk under pressure through a jet, which converts it into a fins spray, and thence it is conveyed into a drying room, where hot air evaporates the moisture and deposits the milk in the form of a fine powder- There is, however, another method of treatment, by which the milk is sprayed on to the surface of a steam-heated cylinder, which dries at, and from which it is automatically collected. By some the first-named process is preferred, owing, it is said, to leaving less sediment than from the steam-heated revolving cylinder. Both processes, however, it is stated, are successful in making a powder which keeps and on being dissolved in the right proportion of water instantly produces a good, wholesome substitute for pure fresh milk. The process is an. American discovery, and the American product has had for some years a good name on the Australian market, : particularly by the bakiing trade. Tropical, countries aro large buyers.

Dried milk previous to the war was largely imported from Germany to supply the large demand for children's and invalids' fools, which it is ascertained have always consisted for the most part of n powdered milk basis. An invalid food which used to be largely advertised throughout Australia as "made in Germany" was found to consist of a mixture of > powdered milk and soluble phosphates.. In numerous other instances are now found a various selection of food commodities, setting fortTi their exceptional qualities, while all the time they are simply dried milk. There are many importations, and as such add to flu? wealth and employment of other peoples, instead of Australia, whose capacity for milk production is without limit. How inueh of this habit of lookins: to importation for so many of their requirements has been, responsible for their own resources oft every hand being overlooked it would be difficult to estimate. ' Even in the pre-war year of 1914 the total value of powdered milk imported under the r.ame of infants' and invalids' special foods, at high prices, amounted for that year alone to £112,000, and this only takes in one class of the commodities which include dried milk as their. principal ingredient. Milk Coffee, for example, is ground coffee mixed with powdered milk, and on the mixture being dissolved in boiling wfiter excellent milk coffee is at once obtained, while milk cocoa, manufactured on similar lines, is also being widely disposed of. It is anticipated that the recent progress is only a forerunner of a largely increased trade, as, in addition to the ordinary export markets, which are now greatly contracted owing to the war. there are the requirements of tropical regions, within convenient access to Australia, guaranteeing ample markets for large supplies. As for the supply of milk, it is capable of being increased to a practically unlimited extent. The combined butter factories of the State, previous to the breaking out of the war, have received a supply of milk and its equivalent in cream) up to ■275,000,000 gallons per annum, but since the war it lias decreased to something like an average of 150,000,000 gallonsDairying on the whole, however, is too remunerative an industry to be permanently abandoned, and the dairy farmers who llave taken a turn at -heep-keeping speak of that as only a temporary measure .pending the return of more favorable times, particularly with regard to labor, and many are now inclined to look with favor upon the share Bystem, than which they consider no other system gives a man with limited capital a better show for a start.—The Leader.