THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, JULY 28, 1913. MILKING MACHINES.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXV, Issue 10713, 28 July 1913, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, JULY 28, 1913. MILKING MACHINES.

| Like every other labour-saving de- ! vice, the milking-machine has its limitations. It will extract the lacteal fluid from the cow, but it will hot keep itself olean. According to Mr D. Cuddie, the head of the Dairy Division, the large number of mechanical milkers how in use has (had a distinct effect on the average cleanliness of the milk supplied to dairy factories. It has been generally recognised amongst the Dairy Instructors and factory managers for some time that while the milk from some farms using machines is satisfactory, the major portion is more or less depreciated through the change from hand to machine milking. The unsatisfactory condition of the dairy produce market this past season has made buyers more .critical, with the result that complaints refjj*rding quality have been more numerous than usual. Milking machine milk has come in.for its share of criticism in this connection, and the Dairy Instructors have therefore turned their attention more distinctly of late to the giving of instruction on the farms where these machines have been in use. The visits of inspection that have been made to the farms have confirmed the opinions of the officers regarding the detrimental effect of unclean machines upon the general purity of the milk, for in many cases the visit to the farm was preceded by the making of a curd test at the factory, the subsequent inspection at the farm being merely to locate the cause of the inferiority indicated by the test. In carrying out this work during recent months the Instructors have inspected some 278 milking machines, and their reports on these plants show that, so far as cleanliness is concerned, the extreme limits are far removed. While a few were so clean that there appeared to be room for no improvement, others were so dirty that notice for a general clean-up within a minimum of j time had to be given. Of the 278 machines inspected, 64 .could be classed as olean, 75 as fair only, and 139 as dirty. These numbers correspond to the percentages of 23, 27, and 60 respectively. The sgpxres thus obtained would suggest that practically one-lhalf of the milking macfflhes in use are contaminating' factors, and are depreciating the value of the manufactured article. Much of the contamination produces gas in tfie curd in cheese-making, causing openness in the body of the tesultant product, a fault) which: bas

been more prevalent in our cheese of late years. The figures indicate a large field for work of improvement through educational means, and lower prioca for inferior quality will doubtless foroe directorates of dairy oompanies to expect th§jr managers to discriminate more closely in the quality of the milk received at the factories. Until a stricter classification of the raw material is more general, little good can 'be done on the farms.