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Dairy on the Prairie 15
No only was the "practice" of agriculture chang- BABCOCK BUTTERFAT TESTING bottle and contents were spun on a simple machine.
ing, but the day-to-day social lives of farmers was The fat would accumulate in the neck of the bottle.
drastically altered. After farm separators became pop- From the beginning of the creamery movement, Graduated markings on the bottle neck provided an
ular, farmers no longer made the daily or twice daily farmers and factory operators had agitated for im- accurate measurement of butterfat content. It was rec-
trek to the factory to deliver milk. Instead the product proved methods to measure the quality of milk —and ommended that, in addition to cheese and butter
was picked up by cream haulers. Although a few ear- later, cream -brought to the factory. Various instru- makers using this test, farmers should also test the
ly creameries employed haulers to pick up milk from ments were used to measure the "quality of cream." milk of individual cows on a daily, weekly, or monthly
farms and deliver it to the factories,51 cream hauling Most actually measured how much cream was
was not a common practice until the 1890s or some- in one farmer's milk sample as compared basis, in order to cull the lesser producers from
times later. With the advent of the cream separator, to that of another farmer. A significantly the herd.
haulers had less bulk to carry, and more and more lesser amount of cream as compared to Farmers may have believed the Bab-
creameries employed this method. the other farmers indicated that the sam- cock test was fair, but there was wide-
ple had been diluted or some of the cream spread belief until about 1900 that the test
Cream haulers were a great convenience to the already skimmed off. These methods was often conducted unfairly. There are
farmer and they had a profound impact on his life. were far from precise; although more ac- numerous references to patrons accusing
Previously, a farmer would meet his agricultural col- curate tests existed, they were complicat- the milk or cream testers of impropri-
leagues every day at the factory as he took his milk ed, time-consuming, and little-used. eties, namely, stating that the amount of
there, usually right after the morning and early butterfat per sample was less than the
evening milking. Given the rigors of farm life, the Stephan Babcock, a chemist and pro- farmer believed it to be.52 Governmental
delivery, however inconvenient, must have provid- fessor at the University of Wisconsin, de- and agricultural society publications ad-
ed welcome relief from daily chores conducted in rel- veloped a butterfat test that took only 10 vocated a strong educational program to
ative isolation and a chance to "catch up on the news" minutes to complete. Babcock never pat- ensure that farmers understood the sci-
with neighbors. With cream hauling, the daily inter- ented the process, seeing the importance entific legitimacy of the Babcock test, in
action of farmer-with-farmer became more and more of releasing his findings to the dairying an effort to avoid these common conflicts.
infrequent and the haulers became the news carriers, world, which he did in 1890. The Babcock method
spreading the latest information as they traveled from used centrifugal force to separate the sugar and casein
farm to farm. from the fat. A sample of milk was placed in a glass
test bottle along with small amount of acid, and the
Above: Babcock test bottles.
Below: Babcock milk-testing machines,
left:farm tester,right:commercial tester.53
ADVANTAGES OF CREAM GATHERING OVER THE WHOLE MILK GRAVITY SYSTEM
Cream Separator Gravity System
All of the cream separated out from the milk Up to 33 percent of butterfat lost
Warm, freshly separated skim milk could be Farmer must transport cold, possibly spoiled skim
fed to livestock milk back home from the factory
Only the cream must be hauled to the factory All of the milk must be hauled
13-minute wait for cream to be separated 24-hour wait for cream to rise naturally
