The next thing is keep those barns in a sanitary condition. Lots of people have different ideas about sanitary conditions but we find, since we put in concrete floors and used an ample amount of bedding with something to absorb the moisture, and have kept them cleaned twice a day, that there is not very much trouble about sanitary conditions. There is another important thing, I think Dr. Wateman brought up the subject last year, and that was the curry comb and brush. I believe that in our herd of seventy cows we can make a difference of seventy quarts of milk every day by using the curry comb and brush, and more than that we make a difference of about 20% in the appearance of the herd when somebody comes to see it. We do not have them come there to buy high class stock because we have none for sale, they come to see where the milk comes from and see where we get it. That is the reason I brought what we call a sanitary pail with me. I had a firm from New York send this pail on not to be sold here but to be shown as what in my opinion is a sanitary pail. I thought some of adopting the pail they call sanitary a few years ago, with cotton batting, cheese cloth, etc., but I talked the matter over with one of the leading men at the Agricul tural College and he said "Nonsense to think of putting cotton batting in there and keep the dirt on that." That little talk kept me from putting in that pail. Now we use a pail which I hold at an angle of 52 degrees, the entire top of the pail is covered and no dust or dirt will get into that pail, and you have no cotton batting nor anything else. If any body doubts the benefit of a pail of that kind let him try it for a day or two and then look at the strainer cloths and I will guarantee he will know whether it is of value or not. After using a pail of this kind, take a big open pail and go down and milk and you will wonder why you have such a big open pail there to catch the dirt. If you have a barn like some of the barns I saw in Wisconsin a few years, with one window one and a half feet square in a barn where there were thirty cows and a double door for fear some air might get to those cows, and the cows were not only saturated with manure but were lying in it from four to six inches deep from their front feet to their tails. Imagine the filth there would be in an open pail when milk is drawn in such a barn.

As a further equipment of the dairy, I would say by all means, if you are going to make market milk, bottle it, but do not bottle it in the barn; have a bottling machine of some kind. If your business is not big enough to warrant a bottling machine that will bottle twelve bottles at a time, get one that will bottle six at a time; if you do not feel it necessary to have great speed get a hand machine that will bottle one at a time, but bottle it and see that the bottling room is a clean place and keep it clean; do not let it get dirty. Then I would suggest right here (and this suggestion was dropped to me a few years ago by one of our inspectors, sorry we have not more) when you send your milk to the market, ship it in ice; deliver it to the consumer in first class shape, and then if the consumer does not take care of it you cannot help him. Treat the consumer the same about bottles. The consumer wants clean nice looking bottles; then do not let a consumer use that bottle all day, then dump the milk out of it, let it lay in the kitchen all night and the next morning give it to you without having been washed, as is frequently done. Tell them "You do not care to have us

bring dirt into the house from the dairy, and neither do we care to bring your dirt into the dairy." Then if you are making a quality of milk that the people are willing to pay for, you must have it put up right. If the people want milk for three, four or five cents a quart, give it to them that way, but if people are willing to pay for a first class article you know that the ordinary cap on the bottle leaves room for dirt to accumulate on the inside of the cap. I say get a cap of some kind. I do not mean this particular cap, get a cap that covers the entire top of the bottle. We need it to be practically air proof and water proof, and more than that when you open it out it looks good. Any customer that would not pay five cents for a bottle like that in preference to four cents with a dirty bottle, we do not want to do business with that class of people, and when a dairyman gets to a place where he can make a distinction between the customers he wants and the ones he does not want to do business with he is successful, but when he lets everyone beat him that is where he fails. Put out an article that will bring a good price, have it a sanitary product pure and simple and get a profit on your business, and you cannot produce too much of it. It only takes people a little while to awake to the fact that a man understands his business, and that is the man with whom they want to do business; but you will find everywhere people who do not know the first thing about a cow who will try to tell you how to run your business. Tell them to move on; never keep a "kicking" customer. If you cannot please him, get rid of him.

To the dairymen I will say one thing, a little verse I learned as a boy in college, which is:

I thank you.

In order to drive the nail boys

Hit it on the head,

Strike with all you might, boys,
While the iron is red.

If you have work to do, boys,

Do it with a will,

For they who reach the top, boys,
First must climb the hill.

The Chairman: The best part of this program is the discussion. Mr. Vanderboom spoke of Dr. Warren last year. The doctor said we dairymen were rather a lazy crowd, that the udder and back of the cow should be clipped and that did not cost much, we ought to do something else that did not cost very much, and at last he said the extra work cost so little that we could afford to sell milk cheap, so the men present began asking him questions. Along about the middle of the afternoon a prominent dairyman dropped in and we asked his opinion. He said he did not know what was going on and the doctor said, "I will tell you. You have been to a county fair and seen a nigger put his head through a hole and every body throw things, well I am the nigger." Mr. Vanderboom can stand it so if there are any questions you want to ask, or anything in which you differ with him, let us hear from you. It may be up in Marquette he has no competition and can tell a customer to do this way or that way or not do it at all, but in other parts of the state there is more than one milkman in town and sometimes it is

not so easy to do that. The other day one of my customers asked me if I would not have my man stop at a competitor in town and bring her a pint of milk that day.

Mr. Bartlett: I would like to ask Mr. Vanderboom whether he thinks it possible for milk to be taken to the city in cans and bottled there, and have a strictly good article?

Mr. Vanderboom: I would think you could put up a good article that way provided the milk man knew his business, and delivered the milk to the bottling concern cold. The two main things in milk production are cleanliness and temperature. If the farmer who produces the milk is all right on the cleanliness part and will use a cooler of some kind, or if he has no cooler put his cans of milk in cold water and stir it until cold, I think it can be delivered in good shape and bottled in the city.

Mr. Bartlett: The reason I asked this question is because health officers in my town have insisted that the milk supply must be bottled at the place of production, and we would like to know whether it is necessary to do that or whether milk can be supplied clean and get a really wholesome article and be bottled in town.

The Chairman: Mr. Bartlett has the crankiest health officers in the state, in Pontiac. They are exceedingly particular.

Mr. Vanderboom: I think the other fellow is right and Mr. Bartlett is wrong. Tom Jones may bring in a first class article that may be all right but Tom Smith may bring in bad milk and when the milk goes to the consumer you cannot say "one-half is good and one-half is bad, we will split the difference," but the good milk is as bad as the poorest you have; but if it is bottled on the farm you know who bottled it and can find out how it was bottled, handled, etc., but if two or three parties bring milk to one place and mix it together, and even though those parties may have been careful of it, you do not know what was done before it was brought there.

Mr. Bartlett: What about Tom Jones' milk that was bottled out on the farm?

Mr. Vanderboom: If Tom Jones does good business on the farm, all right. I think it is quite right that we have inspectors and we should have inspectors, but our force of inspectors is too limited. We have to go after those things stronger if we want the right article. Some complain we are spending too much money on inspectors. We are not. spending one-half enough yet. An inspector once made a suggestion to me which I think was worth a thousand dollars to my trade. Two or three years ago at Marquette we had inspectors for sixty days and no one can tell how much good they did. Last year we had one man collect a fee of a dollar.

Mr. Warren: My experience has been that half the inspectors do not know one-half as much as the farmer.

The Chairman: Mr. Bartlett's question is in regard to bottling milk. at place of production as against bottling it at some other plant.

Mr. Vanderboom: I said I thought it safe to bottle it at a plant provided it was cooled immediately after being produced.

Now my friend spoke about many inspectors not knowing as much about the dairy business as the farmer. Those men are politicians and

5

not inspectors and I hope the state of Michigan will never send a man out for an inspector who is not a dairyman.

Mr. Warren: Let me say that the only inspector that has ever been to my farm has been nothing but a student. He came out there and told me what I ought to do and I told him what I would not do and did not do. They cannot send students out to tell me how to put out milk. If they send out an inspector that knows more about it than I do I will be only too glad, but to send the students out that way every year at the state's expense for me to educate, I have no use for them.

Member: The city inspectors are not allowed to go outside the city. We have to call on the state inspectors to inspect in the country.

Mr. Horton: Any city inspector has a right to go to any farm which produces milk and sends it to a city in which he is inspector. He can go to the farm and inspect conditions and condemn milk when he sees fit. The Chairman: Mr. Horton is an inspector that is not a politician. Mr. Horton: Mr. Bartlett asked a question in regard to bottling milk, either where it was manufactured or at the place where it was started from to be sold, as I understand it. I think the reason for that is that in some cities we find men taking their cans of milk and their dipper and they bottle along the road, where everything contaminates the milk. I think if milk was taken from a stable that was clean, where the cows were clean, the cans were clean and kept closed up and cold until brought to the bottling plant, in my opinion it would be as good as if bottled where manufactured. That is my opinion.

Now Mr. Warren spoke something about the city inspectors going to the country. I happen to know of a city not a thousand miles from here where they have no authority whatever to go outside the city and if an inspector went out he would go on his own responsibility. I have urged the people to make it obligatory upon the inspectors that are here in this city to visit the dairymen here, and they have never even asked or authorized their city inspector to go outside the city and he cannot do it. I know this from experience. I asked a health officer of this town to go with me and visit dairies which I knew were not producing good milk. I can clean up those dairies but I believe that the city authorities should cooperate with us and I believe it yet and I do not believe the state inspector can do as thorough a job as if he were backed up by the city inspector. In an adjoining city the inspector rode with me ten days and we visited every dairy that furnished milk to that city, but I could not induce the inspector of this city to go out of town; he simply said he did not have the authority and the mayor said "We have not the authority to send you out and you had better not go."

Inspector: I happen to be one of the dairy inspectors for Detroit and I want to say in this connection, while we have no authority to go outside of the city we do it and we place our authority in this way. We say to the farmers, "We are inspectors from the Board of Health," and get his permission to inspect there, but if he does not give it to us we pass on, but if he refuses inspection we simply say "Mr. Jones, you cannot send your milk into Detroit." That is as far as our authority goes and it seems to work very well. If he continues to send his milk we camp on his trail and throw it into the sewer.

Mr. Bartlett: That is exactly the thing they should do. I am heartily in accord with the sentiment expressed by this gentleman. I believe every inspector has the right, under the laws of the state of Michigan, to prevent coming into any city samples of milk that are not suitable for food. I heartily agree with the health officer of the city of Pontiac when he goes out and examines the dairies, condemns those that are not sanitary, and refuses the milk from the dairies that are not sanitary, but when he says that good milk, clean, as pure milk as ever came into Pontiac cannot be sent there at a temperature of 40 degrees bottled and be sanitary, I think he is entirely mistaken and it is wrong. The source of dirty milk is at the dairy, is at the barn, is in the dairy room and in the premises where the article is produced. If it is bottled out there and sent in it is more likely to be bad than if it is not bottled because there is more machinery to go through. If a man is filthy, he will be filthy about the bottles, will be filthy all around and probably a lot more filthy than if he put out a reasonably clean can and sent it to town. So it seems to me that so far as this is concerned that really the better way in a city is to have one concern, or perhaps two or whatever number are necessary, to handle the milk at that point.

The Chairman: Mr. Morgan is running a pretty fine plant in Saginaw and he might give his competitors some points as to how to handle customers in order to make a fortune.

Mr. Morgan: I do not know that I can add anything to what has been said. I think I agree with what has been said in regard to some of the inspectors not being competent. We have had different inspectors visit our farm and have had some who understood their business thoroughly, but we have had students with us who told us we could not produce milk without white suits and some other things, and that made us rather tired.

Member: I would like to offer a suggestion on another line. What are we going to do with the farmers that are back from the city and we have no direct reason to send an inspector out to see them. I believe the farmers farther away from the city would be glad to have an inspector drop in and give some little advice; it would be better for the butter man, better for themselves and for our country at large. There should be some way so that the farmers far away from the cities could be helped.

The Chairman: I have always heard that as long as the city consumer was not willing to visit the source of supply, where the milk was obtained, just so long the dairyman would not do the best he possibly could. I believe in fifteen or twenty years that not over a half dozen people drove out to my farm to inspect their source of supply, to see what they were buying, where they were getting it. When you think of how much more careful people are when they buy their other foods than they are of the milk supply their family uses, I do not believe it is much of an object for the dairymen to be so anxious for the county inspectors or the city inspectors to come to their farms, and where a city cares so little about the proposition that they do not have an inspector, I am speaking particularly of Bay City. There has not been a city inspector for several years here but it seems to me it is the consumer that could handle this whole thing because I know of nothing that will bring a milkman to time so quickly as to begin to lose a few of his customers. It has a very good effect on him.