tary Houston and advocated the establishment of a dairy bureau. Evidently the delegation was not very persuasive, for Mr. Houston declined to see the need for the proposed innovation, declaring that departmental experience proved that it was "unwise to have separate branches, independent of each other, dealing with closely related problems." Incidentally, he stuck by the derogatory 1912 report, to which the industry had taken exception. It was verified and confirmed, he said, by matter in the Department's files.

The proposal rather languished after this, though it was never allowed to die. There was occasional congressional talk upon the matter, but no congressional action until the matter was finally consummated in 1924. Indeed, the situation with regard to it is curious, if not unique, in that no bills proposing the creation of a dairy bureau were introduced in Congress prior to the bill that finally became law. There were no preliminary skirmishes. The bill was introduced on February 19, 1924, by Representative Haugen, of Iowa, and it passed the Senate on May 22, 1924, with the active assistance of Senator McNary, of Oregon. It became law seven days later.

As to the wisdom or unwisdom of making dairying independent of the great Bureau of Animal Industry, there is, of course, difference of opinion. Into that matter it is not in the province of this monograph to go. Time will show whether the step was a wise one. But this can be confidently asserted—that the new Bureau of Dairy Industry, conceded to be one of the most important dairy research organizations in the world, possesses at the very outset of its independent existence a magnificent opportunity. It can foster and stimulate the great dairy industry, the continuing and increasing prosperity of which is as important to the country at large as it is to the industry itself. And it can see to it that the dairy products that are supplied to the people of the United States are above criticism-cleanly made, honestly made, and reasonably sold. If it can do these two things-and it can do neither one of them in the best sense without doing the other-it need not worry about its independence. It will have abundantly justified it.

CHAPTER II

ACTIVITIES

The functions which it is the Bureau of Dairy Industry's job to perform are laid out with admirable brevity and clearness in the organic act. There it is unmistakably declared that the Bureau has just two things to do: to get dairy knowledge, and to impart it. The simple and logical way to discuss its activities, therefore, is along these two lines; in other words, investigative activities; and disseminative activities.

Investigative Activities. It has been said of the Bureau of Dairy Industry by one of its officers that it is 95 per cent a research organization. The bulk of its activities, therefore, are investigative ones, which, for convenience of consideration, may be classified into: (1) Substance Investigations; (2) Cattle Investigations; (3) Pasturing Investigations; and (4) Miscellaneous Investigations. Substance Investigations. The substances which may be generally referred to as lacteal substances, such as milk, butter, cheese, etc... are the most important things in the dairy industry, because the getting of them or the wealth for which they stand is what the dairy industry is "all about." It goes without saying, therefore, that the dairy industry cannot know too much about them—their compositions, their susceptibilities, their reactions to varying conditions, and what not. As knowledge of them increases, their production becomes more and more a matter of scientific certainty, less and less one of tradition, chance, and knack.

Milk, for example, the basic product, or substance, of the dairy industry, is the result of secretional processes in cows. Upon these processes the nutrition of the producing animals has naturally a most vital bearing. It has an equally vital bearing upon the processes of reproduction, for it is imperative that certain accessory substances or vitamins be supplied to breeding cows in their feed to insure normal conception and delivery.

How to supply them with certainty and exactness, however, is still a secret. So are the answers to many another question mark

on the nutritional page. Ultimately it is believed that they can all be answered by chemistry; and in the laboratories of the Bureau effort toward that end is constantly going forward. So many are the possible ramifications of the work in nutrition that anything like a detailed account of it would be out of the question here. To give the reader a hint, however, of its intricacy, and of its fundamental nature-a hint, incidentally, that "goes" for practically every other form of substance investigation in which the Bureau is engaged a word may be said regarding one angle of it upon which work has been going on for some years. This is an investigation designed to lay bare the mechanism of the process whereby certain proteins going into the mouth of a cow in the form of feed become converted into milk proteins by the time they emerge at the udder. In the making of this investigation certain acids are being followed from the digestive tract through the blood to the mammary gland, where they are recombined to build up the casein and albumin of the milk-an operation in trail following that is not quite so simple as it sounds.

Investigations are also being made into the relations between the minerals in the rations of dairy cows and their milk secretion. An attempt is being made to find out just what minerals are needed for high milk secretion and how they can best be obtained from the feed. For these experiments a herd is especially maintained at the Beltsville farm in a barn constructed for the carrying on of the work. The cows in this herd are fed a carefully determined and weighed ration, the excreta is analyzed, and it is sought to be determined how much of the ration is retained, how much is wasted, and how much goes into the body.

Apart from the nutritional studies, investigations are being made into the physical-chemical constitution of milk, with special reference to its relation to changes produced by bacteria, heat, and other factors.

On the straight bacteriological side, also, much work is being done. Almost all dairy problems have a bacteriological background, with solutions largely turning upon the matter of control of bacterial content and growth. The Bureau is attempting to learn in its laboratories all it can about how bacteria get into milk and what they do when they get in. The relation of the amount of oxygen in milk to the growth of different bacteria is also being studied, as

are the conditions which stimulate sport formation in bacteria and those which stimulate or limit the lactic fermentation. A study on a comprehensive scale of the proteolytic bacteria1 in milk, which has been under way for several years, is now being brought to completion.

Investigations of the factors controlling the texture and flavor of ice cream are being made. These investigations include such things as determinations of the temperatures at which crystals of lactose, cane sugar, milk salts, and water separate when ice cream is frozen. Results being obtained throw some light on the ice cream quality known as "sandiness."

Work being done with condensed and evaporated milk and milk powder include investigations of the effect of sterilization on body, flavor, and color; the cause and control of deterioration in milk powder; experiments with milk powder in bread baking to determine if the condition of the albumin in milk powder has any relation to its effect on the size and quality of the loaf; and attempts to produce a moderate costing modified milk suitable for infant feeding, under conditions where satisfactory fresh milk cannot be had. Such a modified milk made in the Washington and Grove City laboratories is now being tried out in a number of hospitals.

Cheese investigations, which are carried on partly in the Washington laboratories but principally in the laboratories at the Grove City creamery, and in the creamery itself, include bacteriological research into the processes producing the ripening of Swiss cheese and those creating its most desirable texture. Similar investigations are carried out in connection with other cheeses; and at the Grove City creamery methods established by experimentation are being used in the manufacture of Roquefort, Parmesan, Camembert, and several other foreign cheeses. For some years Roquefort of an excellent quality has been produced commercially at Grove City.

Other investigations being carried on include various utilizational studies in connection with certain by-products of butter and cheese making; such as the separation of albumin and lactose from whey, and their utilization in cooking, baking, and candy making; and also the utilization of the skim milk accumulating at creameries, by the manufacture from it of a concentrated sour milk with good keeping qualities. Experiments along this last-mentioned line have recently

1 Those converting proteids into diffusible substances.

3

resulted in the extensive utilization of a by-product formerly almost entirely wasted.

In addition to the substance investigations having to do with the lacteal substances, studies are made of the tissue of the udders and the mammary glands of slaughtered cows. The gross anatomy of the udder is studied from the frozen udder sections of slaughtered cows; and the capacities of the secretory systems of such udders are measured and recorded. Studies in milk secretion are made by means of post-mortem milking. The slaughtered cows used in these tests-and in a number of other post-mortem tests which need not be enumerated-are partly animals from a Chicago packing plant with which special study arrangements have been made, partly discarded cows from the dairy herd at the Beltsville Farm.

Cattle Investigations. Success in dairying does not differ materially from success in anything else. Any form of success depends upon the average efficiency of the units involved. If that average is high, "you bank "; if it is not, "you go into the red." That's the whole story; and it is as fixed as the dairying statutes of the Medes and Persians.

The dairying unit is the dairy cow. It costs just about as much to feed and care for a cow that produces little as it does to maintain a cow that comes through handsomely at every milking. It is self-evident, therefore, that a successful dairy herd is one composed of cows with high production records. It is equally self-evident that the dairy herd with a low production average is either "on the rocks or headed that way.

Dairy herds with excellent production averages are by no means unknown in the United States. There are many such herds. But taking the country as a whole our cow production average is not what it should be. The average American dairy cow produces annually about four thousand pounds of milk containing about 160 pounds of butter fat. When it is considered that the average for Denmark and the United Kingdom is nearly six thousand pounds, that for Switzerland seven thousand, and that for Holland all but eight thousand, it needs no argument to demonstrate that there is room for improvement in our dairy industry. The figures just given prove conclusively that we are only producing half what we might be producing. They also prove that the answer to our problem is not more cows but better cows. How to work that