Littell's Living Age/Volume 128/Issue 1651/Cheese-Factories in America

From The Philadelphia Ledger.

CHEESE-FACTORIES IN AMERICA.

The factory system of making butter and cheese, an industry of great and growing commercial importance, and the history of which is full of interesting and useful lessons, has grown up in this country within the last quarter of a century from small beginnings. Prior to 1851 Herkimer and Oneida Counties, in central New York, had become somewhat famous for their cheese products, their dairies being then managed by individual owners with varying and somewhat uncertain success. Jesse Williams, a dairyman, living near Rome, in Oneida County, had achieved a reputation for making cheese of the best quality, and when, in 1851, one of his sons was married and went to live on another dairy-farm in the neighbourhood, Mr. Williams endeavoured to contract for the sale of cheese made by his son at the enhanced price paid for his own products. He recognized the fact that to secure this the cheese must be as good as his own, and he determined, after some consideration, to have the milk from his son's dairy brought to his own place, there to be manufactured into cheese. This was the origin of associated dairying, and for three years Mr. Williams and those who took their milk to him were the only ones who profited by a system that secured uniformity in the product, the concentration of skill, and a great reduction in the cost of labour and supplies. But the success of the system once assured, the growth was quite rapid, and in 1866 there were more than 500 cheese "factories" in operation in the state of New York. Cheese-making, once monopolized by the rich counties of Central New York, has since then spread to other parts of the state, and the factory system is now adopted in some degree in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, and other Western States, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine, and Canada, and has even spread to England and Russia. In 1873 Canada manufactured 20,000,000 pounds of cheese by the American method. The scheme of the Oneida farmer of 1851 to secure uniformity in the products of two dairies has reproduced itself in several thousand establishments, employing an estimated capital of twenty-five millions of dollars, and producing each year one hundred and fifty millions of dollars' worth of the manufactured article. The receipts at New York from the interior amounted in 1863 to 281,318 boxes of cheese, in 1874 to 2,204,493 boxes. The exports from New York in 1863 were 38,577,357 pounds, in 1874 they were 96,834,691 pounds. This return will give some idea of the rapid growth of the industry, and of its great importance to the commerce of the country. A committee of the New York Butter and Cheese Exchange estimates the annual product of butter in the country at 1,440,000,000 pounds, of which 53,333,333 pounds are exported. These statistics of the trade derive their chief interest from the fact that the enormous business they represent has grown up from the earnest efforts of a single man to make in large quantities a good article, which he was already making in small quantities. If he had resorted to trickery and deception he might have achieved a temporary success, but he could never have laid the foundations of such a great industry with any other corner-stone than that of honesty. A very full and readable description of the processes of making butter and cheese is published in the November number of Harper's Monthly Magazine. Of these we can only say that they have been the subject of study by chemists and practical dairymen of the highest culture, and that, although the latter know how to make good cheese, neither they nor the chemists understand precisely how it is done. One hundred parts of milk are made up of about eighty-seven and one-half parts of water, three and one-half parts of butter, three and one-eighth parts of caseine or pure curd, five and one-eighth parts of sugar, and less than one part of mineral matter. In cheese-making the design is to harden the caseine or curd, and to do it in such a way as to imprison globules of butter-oil in the curd. To coagulate the milk the cheese-maker pours a solution of rennet into the milk, and then begins the operation he does not understand — the "digestion" of the milk. The curing of the cheese is regarded as a further process of digestion. Cheese-factories, as they are now built, are great buildings supplied with steam-power and steam-heating apparatus, and are altogether unlike the dairies of a quarter of a century ago. The cheese-maker is an educated workman; his associates, the dairymen, are scarcely inferior in knowledge, and it is said that the treasurer of a "factory association," himself a dairyman, must attain such mathematical accuracy as to be able to demonstrate that it took 9.746 pounds of milk to make a pound of cheese, and that he who delivered a pound of milk to the factory is entitled therefore to 1.274 cents, at the then ruling price of cheese.