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of students from the new dairy school was graduated, thus securing for the university two crops from the same land within a year. The building was finished during the summer of 1892, and is a model in appearance and equipment. Its cost up to date with equipment amounts to nearly forty thousand dollars. The name of the building, Hiram Smith Hall, was given it in honor of the veteran Wisconsin dairyman, Hon. Hiram Smith (1890), for twelve years a regent of the University and chairman of the Farm Committee of the Board of Regents, to whose enthusiasm and untiring efforts the school largely owes its existence. The building is calculated to accommodate one hundred students, and this number was reached the first year. Last year one hundred candidates applied for admission before December 1st, although the school did not begin until January 4th, and later applicants had to be turned away. Students have come from Canada and almost every State in the Union where dairying is a leading industry: Minnesota, Illinois, and Michigan have furnished their quota; so have Maine and California; New Hampshire and Nevada; New York, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas.

We can not here enter into a detailed description of the courses of instruction offered in the school, but a short outline of the same will be given. Only branches bearing directly on the science and practice of dairying and on the manufacture of dairy products are taught. The policy of the governing board is to make the instruction thoroughly practical; at the same time the theoretical side is considered no less important. The professors and instructors connected with the school are specialists in their various branches; the instructors in the cheese room and the creamery are expert cheese and butter makers.

The instruction is given, first, by lectures; second, by work at the separators, the churns, and the cheese vats, as well as in the laboratory. Lectures are given in the following branches: The breeds and breeding of dairy cows, the feeding of dairy cows, diseases of dairy cows, the chemistry of milk and its products, bacteriology of the dairy products, physical problems connected with the dairy, and the care and management of the boiler and engine. These subjects are presented to the class by different professors of the university.

The practical work is taught in the butter and cheese room, as well as in the laboratory. The picture of the separating room shows the arrangement of the separators. Of these all the latest and most improved patterns are kept, as well as of the butter extractor. It may be in order to state, for the benefit of the many readers who never were inside of a creamery or a farm dairy, that a cream separator or a centrifuge, as it is sometimes called, is a machine for separating the cream from the skim milk by means of

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centrifugal force. A strong steel bowl is made to rotate by handpower or steam, at a speed of five to eight thousand revolutions. per minute; by this means the heavier portion of the milk, the skim milk, is separated from the lighter portion, the cream, and both are collected in separate vessels.

The work in the creamery room includes the handling and care of the cream previous to churning, the churning, and the working and packing of the butter. In the cheese room, where there are eight milk vats, each of a capacity of three hundred pounds, thirty-two students may work at the same time; the various steps in cheese-making, from the proper handling of the milk to the curing of the cheese, are here learned.

A most important part of the instruction is the milk testing, which is taught in the laboratory. Farmers' boys, who previously to their entering the school knew nothing whatever about the different components of milk, here learn to determine the percentage of fat in milk, skim milk, buttermilk, whey, and cream, with almost as great accuracy as any experienced chemist, and certainly as satisfactorily for all practical purposes. This has been made possible by the introduction of the Babcock test for the determination of fat in milk, a method invented nearly four years ago by Dr. S. M. Babcock, chief chemist to the Wisconsin Experiment Station. The method has won for its originator a worldwide reputation and the gratitude of progressive dairy farmers in this and other countries. The test, which was given to the public without any restriction of patent, is extremely simple, and may be made on a farm or in a creamery or cheese factory as well as in a chemical laboratory, every where with equal correctness and facility. In the dairy school the percentage of fat in milk is determined by Babcock's test, and by a combination of the test and the lactometer (a simple apparatus to determine the specific gravity of milk or its weight in relation to water), adulteration of the milk, and the extent of the same may be detected.

The course of the dairy school lasts three months-viz., January to March, inclusive. The expenses of the school while in operation are very heavy; the milk bill alone thus amounts to eighty dollars a day during this time. In addition to this course, dairy certificates are issued to such graduates of the school as have shown proficiency in the operation of a creamery or a cheese factory for one or more seasons; candidates for such certificates must send in reports of their work once a month to the dean of the college; their factories are further inspected by an instructor of the school, to ascertain whether or not the candidate may be granted a certificate, and thereby given the recommendation of the State Dairy School as a successful butter or cheese maker.

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Dairy schools on a similar plan as the one just described have been in operation during the past year or two at the Agricultural Colleges of Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Iowa, and New York (Cornell). Other States will doubtless establish similar schools in the near future, as the demand for instruction in these branches is steadily increasing, and students are taxing to the utmost the capacity of the schools existing.

Only a small proportion of the milk produced in the United States is obtained on farms situated in the direct neighborhood of cities where the milk can be sold as such; in all other places it must be manufactured into butter or cheese. Where the population of a district is not sufficient to support a butter or cheese factory, the manufacture of dairy products, and primarily butter, must take place on the farm itself. Modern invention has greatly facilitated the work of butter-making on the farm; by the introduction of hand separators all apparatus for setting the milk, either in ice tanks or in a separate milk room, in metal or wooden vessels, may be done away with; the cream is obtained at once by the separator, and thus only one fifth of the quantity of material has to be taken care of, as the skim milk may be fed directly to calves or pigs. These hand separators are made in various sizes to suit the requirements of different herds. They are not very expensive, so that any farmer of moderate means can buy them. The manufacturers claim for them, and without exaggeration, that they will pay their cost each year over and above any other system, with a herd of ten or more cows, on account of the larger yield of butter obtained with them from the same quantity of milk. In other systems of creaming a much larger portion of the fat in the milk is left in the skim milk, which is thus lost for butter-making.

The modern churns, which are mostly barrel-shaped or of rectangular form, make churning mere play. The method of buttermaking now generally adopted is about as follows: The cream ist churned at about 56° to 62° Fahr., the temperature differing somewhat with the season and the ripeness of the cream. The butter will come after twenty to forty minutes' turning, sometimes more, sometimes less, according to acidity, temperature, and other conditions present. The buttermilk is then drawn off through a hole near the bottom of the churn, and the butter washed in the churn, placed on the butter worker to free it as completely as possible from buttermilk, and then salted (one ounce of salt to one pound of butter); again worked and packed in tubs, and is now ready for shipment. Our pictures show the making of creamery and of dairy butter.

In this country cheese is made almost entirely in factories; as many will know, the process employed in the making of our ordi

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FIG. 4.-BUTTER-MAKING APPARATUS FOR SMALL DAIRIES.

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