Modern Business Geography 
Fig. 66. Milking a camel. Primitive people who live largely on the milk of their flocks and 
herds make no attempt to keep it fresh. They find it both more palatable and more digestible 
when properly soured than when fresh. They convert much of it into a verv hard. sour cheese. 
to the dairy farm, where the primary production takes place. There 
we find that the mild-eyed cow is mistress of all she surveys. During 
cold weather, and usually at night during all seasons, she is kept 
in a clean barn where a bed of straw is spread for her comfort. She 
is provided with the food that is most to her liking — sweet hay, 
cotton-seed meal, wheat bran, or juicy cornstalks. In the best barns 
a stream of fresh water flows before her at all times. At the same 
hours, two or three times each day, a milker approaches her quietly 
with a clean pail and skillfully takes the milk from her udder. On 
some farms milking machines are used because they do the work at 
less cost and keep the milk cleaner than hand-milkers can. 
All this care is designed to make the cow give a large amount of 
rich milk. The lack of it is one of the chief reasons why many 
cows give a small amount of milk or milk of poor quality. 
The care of milk. As soon as the milk is taken from the cow it is 
strained through cloth and cooled. It is then kept cool until it is 
delivered to the refrigerated milk car at the railway station, or to the 
neighborhood creamery or cheese factory. Or the farmer may sepa- 
rate the cream from the rest of the milk by whirling it very rapidly 
in a machine called a ‘ separator.” He then takes the cream to the 
creamery, where it is made into butter, while the skim milk is kept 
at home and fed to the pigs.